Groups of verbal MA-matched autistic and non-autistic retarded adolescents and young adults were tested for their ability to recognize emotion and personal identity in photographed faces and parts of faces. The tasks were to match expressions of emotion across different individuals, and to identify unfamiliar individuals despite changes in emotional expression. Faces were also presented upside-down. The results indicated a specific abnormality in the way autistic individuals perceive emotion, and possibly sex, in people's faces. In addition, however, autistic subjects' superior ability in matching upside-down faces suggested a more far-reaching abnormality in their perception of faces.

SynopsisAutistic and non-autistic mentally retarded adolescents and young adults were individually matched for age and verbal ability and were given tasks in which they chose photographs of faces for emotionally expressive voices, and photographs of non-emotional things or events to accompany recorded sounds. The results were that relative to control subjects, autistic individuals performed less well on the emotion tasks than on the non-emotion tasks. The findings suggest that autistic individuals have a disability in recognizing bodily expressions of emotion, and that there is a degree of task-specificity to this impairment.

Groups of autistic and non‐autistic retarded adolescents and young adults, individually matched for CA and verbal MA, together with a group of normal young children individually matched for verbal MA, were tested for their ability to name photographs of emotionally expressive faces and emotion‐unrelated photographs of objects, and to name corresponding sounds recorded on audiotape. The results indicated that although BPVS‐matched autistic and non‐autistic retarded subjects were not significantly different when the emotion tasks were considered in isolation, autistic subjects differed from non‐autistic retarded and normal subjects in being relatively poor at naming feelings vis‐à‐vis naming non‐personal objects. On the other hand, there was evidence that group differences between non‐autistic mentally retarded and normal subjects were not specific to the task of naming emotions. This raises doubt about claims that non‐autistic mentally retarded individuals have specific deficits in emotion recognition.