We compared young people with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) with age, sex and IQ matched controls on emotion recognition of faces and pictorial context. Each participant completed two tests of emotion recognition. The first used Ekman series faces. The second used facial expressions in visual context. A control task involved identifying occupations using visual context. The ability to recognize emotions in faces (with or without context) and the ability to identify occupations from context was positively correlated with both increasing age and IQ score. Neither a diagnosis of ASD nor a measure of severity (Autism Quotient score) affected these abilities, except that the participants with ASD were significantly worse at recognizing angry and happy facial expressions. Unlike the control group, most participants with ASD mirrored the facial expression before interpreting it. Test conditions may lead to results different from everyday life. Alternatively, deficits in emotion recognition in high-functioning ASD may be less marked than previously thought.

a b st r a c tThis paper studies two types of cognitive factors which have been assumed to underpin people's interpretation of conditional promises and threats: logic and socio-cognitive assumptions about what conditional promisors and threateners are obliged and permitted to do. We consider whether the logic of conditionals is compatible with the socio-cognitive assumptions underlying their interpretation or whether the two come apart. From the classical logical accounts of conditionals, almost all modern theories have inherited a constraint which specifies that a conditional cannot be true if its antecedent is true and consequent false. This logical constraint is widely assumed to constitute, at least partially, a conditional's semantics, or 'core meaning'. A replication of Beller et al. 's (2005) study, reported in this paper, calls for revisiting this longstanding, cross-theoretically assumed constraint. As predicted, we have found that, in English, conditional promises are generally consistent with this logical constraint, but threats are not. Our findings provide evidence for the existence of a new usage-based category of conditional threats, and support the claim that the observed logical asymmetry in the interpretation of conditional promises versus threats is just an[*] We are extremely grateful to Sieghard Beller for providing us with the German versions of the 2005 questionnaires. We would like to thank Linda Walz for translation and Stephanie Foxton, Arianna Nargis Hussain, and Tilly Flint, our student research assistants, for their help with the data collection. Our thanks also go to Andrew Merrison for discussions about the questionnaires and to York St John University for sponsoring various stages of this project with funding from the Student Researchers Scheme and the Ad Hoc Fund. Finally, we are grateful to Language and Cognition's reviewers and editors for extremely useful comments, which have helped improve this paper.terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.

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