Can Neurotypical Individuals Read Autistic Facial Expressions? Atypical Production of Emotional Facial Expressions in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

The difficulties encountered by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when interacting with neurotypical (NT, i.e. nonautistic) individuals are usually attributed to failure to recognize the emotions and mental states of their NT interaction partner. It is also possible, however, that at least some of the difficulty is due to a failure of NT individuals to read the mental and emotional states of ASD interaction partners. Previous research has frequently observed deficits of typical facial emotion recognition in individuals with ASD, suggesting atypical representations of emotional expressions. Relatively little research, however, has investigated the ability of individuals with ASD to produce recognizable emotional expressions, and thus, whether NT individuals can recognize autistic emotional expressions. The few studies which have investigated this have used only NT observers, making it impossible to determine whether atypical representations are shared among individuals with ASD, or idiosyncratic. This study investigated NT and ASD participants’ ability to recognize emotional expressions produced by NT and ASD posers. Three posing conditions were included, to determine whether potential group differences are due to atypical cognitive representations of emotion, impaired understanding of the communicative value of expressions, or poor proprioceptive feedback. Results indicated that ASD expressions were recognized less well than NT expressions, and that this is likely due to a genuine deficit in the representation of typical emotional expressions in this population. Further, ASD expressions were equally poorly recognized by NT individuals and those with ASD, implicating idiosyncratic, rather than common, atypical representations of emotional expressions in ASD. Autism Res 2016, 9: 262–271. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Interaction takes two: Typical adults exhibit mind-blindness towards those with autism spectrum disorder.

“…Increased variability in autistic actions may mean that a given autistic participant's action models are a poorer fit to those of other autistic individuals (note that autistic facial expressions have also been shown to have more idiosyncratic qualities, which may similarly impair expression understanding; Brewer et al, 2016;Macdonald et al, 1989). Alternatively, autistic action models may be tuned to both atypical (autistic) and typical movements.…”

Expressive Incoherence and Alexithymia in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Since the first accounts of the characteristics presented by children with ASD (Asperger 1944;Kanner 1968), uncommon emotional facial expression's production has been described (Brewer et al 2016;Faso et al 2015;Volker et al 2009). …”

“…The few studies that have examined alexithymia in children with ASD have found that, similarly to adults (Berthoz and Hill 2005), alexithymia is more prevalent among children with ASD than among TD children (Griffin et al 2015;Rieffe et al 2007). In one study it was found that the facial expressions of individuals with higher levels of alexithymia appeared to be odder than of those with lower levels (Brewer et al 2016). Which led the authors to suggest that despite the overlap between alexithymia and ASD, alexithymia may be linked to atypical emotional expressions in ASD (Brewer et al 2016).…”

“…In one study it was found that the facial expressions of individuals with higher levels of alexithymia appeared to be odder than of those with lower levels (Brewer et al 2016). Which led the authors to suggest that despite the overlap between alexithymia and ASD, alexithymia may be linked to atypical emotional expressions in ASD (Brewer et al 2016). Therefore, alexithymia could play an important role in the explanation of emotional response incoherence in individuals with ASD.…”

“…Children with ASD, compared to TD children, have more ambiguous and awkward emotional facial expressions and their facial and behavioral expressions are less coherent (e.g. Brewer et al 2016).…”