Multimodal emotion perception: Influences of autism spectrum disorder and autism-like traits

Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder may exhibit impaired production and perception of facial and vocal affect cues. For example, both neurotypical and autistic adults tend to interpret affect less accurately from autistic faces and voices, with autistic listeners displaying overall lower identification accuracy. However, earlier studies compared neurotypical and autistic emotion perception under exclusively unimodal conditions (facial or verbal cues alone) or exclusively multimodal conditions in which utterances and static faces were presented sequentially. This study assesses neurotypical adults' accuracy and response time in a forced-choice emotion identification task with video-only, audio-only, and audiovisual recordings of neurotypical and autistic talkers. The study also investigates the relation between listeners' task performance and Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores (degree of autism-like traits). Preliminary results show listeners are less accurate when identifying autistic emotional expressions, compared to neurotypical expressions, while talker type has no main effect on response time. Results also suggest a relation between AQ score and emotion-perception ability (accuracy and response time) in neurotypical respondents. This research will provide insight into emotion perception and production differences, along with implications for interpersonal functioning, in autism and under the broader autism phenotype within the neurotypical population. [Work supported by the Indiana University Hutton Honors College.]