Abstract
We investigated whether the type of stimulus (pictures of static faces vs. body motion) contributes differently to the recognition of emotions. The performance (accuracy and response times) of 25 Low Autistic Traits (LAT group) young adults (21 males) and 20 young adults (16 males) with either High Autistic Traits or with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HAT group) was compared in the recognition of four emotions (Happiness, Anger, Fear, and Sadness) either shown in static faces or conveyed by moving body patch-light displays (PLDs). Overall, HAT individuals were as accurate as LAT ones in perceiving emotions both with faces and with PLDs. Moreover, they correctly described non-emotional actions depicted by PLDs, indicating that they perceived the motion conveyed by the PLDs per se. For LAT participants, happiness proved to be the easiest emotion to be recognized: in line with previous studies we found a happy face advantage for faces, which for the first time was also found for bodies (happy body advantage). Furthermore, LAT participants recognized sadness better by static faces and fear by PLDs. This advantage for motion kinematics in the recognition of fear was not present in HAT participants, suggesting that (i) emotion recognition is not generally impaired in HAT individuals, (ii) the cues exploited for emotion recognition by LAT and HAT groups are not always the same. These findings are discussed against the background of emotional processing in typically and atypically developed individuals.
Highlights
Research on emotion recognition has been dominated by studies focusing on faces and using static stimuli, in particular static photographs of facial expressions
In LAT individuals we expected (i) body language to be at least as effective as static face in the recognition of fear; (ii) sadness to be better recognized through facial expression; (iii) to find an advantage for happiness when it is conveyed through patch-light displays (PLDs); (iv) HAT individuals to be as good as LAT ones in recognizing happiness both with facial expressions and PLDs; (v) HAT individuals to rely on different cues for the recognition of fear and anger than LAT participants
The experiment was divided in four sessions: (i) static faces test; (ii) bodily PLD kinematics test; (iii) action-recognition test (Alaerts et al, 2011), and (iv) Autism Quotient (AQ) questionnaire
Summary
Research on emotion recognition has been dominated by studies focusing on faces and using static stimuli, in particular static photographs of facial expressions. This is probably due to two reasons. An increasing number of scientists have become aware of the fact that facial expressions are not the only source of input that conveys emotionally relevant information and there is a small but consistent corpus of research showing that human observers are able to distinguish at least a limited set of emotions from static body expressions in the absence of facial cues (see Atkinson, 2013 for a review)
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