Abstract
To date, studies have not established whether autistic and non-autistic individuals differ in emotion recognition from facial motion cues when matched in terms of alexithymia. Here, autistic and non-autistic adults (N = 60) matched on age, gender, non-verbal reasoning ability and alexithymia, completed an emotion recognition task, which employed dynamic point light displays of emotional facial expressions manipulated in terms of speed and spatial exaggeration. Autistic participants exhibited significantly lower accuracy for angry, but not happy or sad, facial motion with unmanipulated speed and spatial exaggeration. Autistic, and not alexithymic, traits were predictive of accuracy for angry facial motion with unmanipulated speed and spatial exaggeration. Alexithymic traits, in contrast, were predictive of the magnitude of both correct and incorrect emotion ratings.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, characterized by difficulties in social communication, and restricted and repetitive interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
(F(1,58) = 7.75, p < 0.01, ηP2 = 0.12). These results suggest that, whilst controls improved in their accuracy for angry facial motion across each level of increasing kinematic manipulation, for autistic participants, only the most extreme (K3) level of the kinematic manipulation resulted in an accuracy boost
Since the analyses reported above were restricted to the normal (S2K2) level for angry facial motion, we constructed one further linear mixed effects model to investigate whether autistic and/or alexithymic traits are predictive of higher correct and incorrect emotion ratings across all emotions and levels of the spatial and kinematic manipulation
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, characterized by difficulties in social communication, and restricted and repetitive interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Since the ability to infer emotion from facial expressions is important for social interaction, emotion recognition has long been suspected as a difficulty in ASD (Hobson, 1986). The question of whether autistic individuals exhibit atypical facial emotion recognition has been debated for over 30 years. The most recent contributions to this debate claim that it is not autism per se that is linked to emotion recognition atypicalities but rather alexithymia (Bird & Cook, 2013; Kinnaird et al, 2019; Oakley et al, 2016; Poquérusse et al, 2018). Cook et al (2013) demonstrated that continuous measures of alexithymic, but not autistic, traits are predictive of poorer facial emotion recognition from static face images. Bird and Cook (2013) propose ‘the alexithymia hypothesis’: autistic individuals’ difficulties in
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