Can Neurotypical Individuals Read Autistic Facial Expressions? Atypical Production of Emotional Facial Expressions in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Rebecca Brewer*, Federica Biotti, Caroline Catmur, Clare Press, Francesca Happé, Richard Cook, Geoffrey Bird

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

103 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The difficulties encountered by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when interacting with neurotypical (NT, i.e. nonautistic) individuals are usually attributed to failure to recognize the emotions and mental states of their NT interaction partner. It is also possible, however, that at least some of the difficulty is due to a failure of NT individuals to read the mental and emotional states of ASD interaction partners. Previous research has frequently observed deficits of typical facial emotion recognition in individuals with ASD, suggesting atypical representations of emotional expressions. Relatively little research, however, has investigated the ability of individuals with ASD to produce recognizable emotional expressions, and thus, whether NT individuals can recognize autistic emotional expressions. The few studies which have investigated this have used only NT observers, making it impossible to determine whether atypical representations are shared among individuals with ASD, or idiosyncratic. This study investigated NT and ASD participants' ability to recognize emotional expressions produced by NT and ASD posers. Three posing conditions were included, to determine whether potential group differences are due to atypical cognitive representations of emotion, impaired understanding of the communicative value of expressions, or poor proprioceptive feedback. Results indicated that ASD expressions were recognized less well than NT expressions, and that this is likely due to a genuine deficit in the representation of typical emotional expressions in this population. Further, ASD expressions were equally poorly recognized by NT individuals and those with ASD, implicating idiosyncratic, rather than common, atypical representations of emotional expressions in ASD. Autism Res 2016, 9: 262-271.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)262-271
Number of pages10
JournalAutism Research
Volume9
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2016

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We are extremely grateful for Sukhjit Sidhu’s assistance with stimulus production and statistical analyses. Ethical approval: Ethical approval for the current research was approved by the local Research Ethics Committee. Conflict of interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Keywords

  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Expression production
  • Face perception
  • Social cognition

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Neuroscience
  • Clinical Neurology
  • Genetics(clinical)

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