Facing up to others' emotions: No evidence of autism‐related deficits in metacognitive awareness of emotion recognition

Abstract

Emotion recognition difficulties are considered to contribute to social-communicative problems for autistic individuals and awareness of such difficulties may be critical for the identification and pursuit of strategies that will mitigate their adverse effects. We examined metacognitive awareness of face emotion recognition responses in autistic (N = 63) and non-autistic (N = 67) adults across (a) static, dynamic and social face emotion stimuli, (b) free-and forced-report response formats, and (c) four different sets of the six "basic" and six "complex" emotions. Within-individual relationships between recognition accuracy and post-recognition confidence provided no indication that autistic individuals were poorer at discriminating correct from incorrect recognition responses than non-autistic individuals, although both groups exhibited marked inter-individual variability. Although the autistic group was less accurate and slower to recognize emotions, confidence-accuracy calibration analyses provided no evidence of reduced sensitivity on their part to fluctuations in their emotion recognition performance. Across variations in stimulus type, response format and emotion, increases in accuracy were associated with progressively higher confidence, with similar calibration curves for both groups. Calibration curves for both groups were, however, characterized by overconfidence at the higher confidence levels (i.e., overall accuracy less than the average confidence level), with the non-autistic group contributing more decisions with 90%-100% confidence. Comparisons of slow and fast responders provided no evidence of a "hardeasy" effect-the tendency to exhibit overconfidence during hard tasks and underconfidence during easy tasks-suggesting that autistic individuals' slower recognition responding may reflect a strategic difference rather than a processing speed limitation. Lay SummaryIt is generally considered that autistic individuals may have difficulty recognizing other people's facial emotions. However, little is known about their awareness of any emotion recognition difficulties they may experience. This study indicates that, although there is considerable individual variability, autistic adults were as sensitive to variations in the accuracy of their recognition of others' emotions as their non-autistic peers.

Autistic adults' perspectives on appropriate empathic responses to others' emotions

“…Fifth, although Brewer et al's (2022) findings highlighted awareness of the accuracy of emotion recognition responses among both autistic and non‐autistic individuals, this did not apply to awareness of the appropriateness of empathic responses. The within‐individual confidence‐appropriateness index coefficients provided no indication that either group reliably discriminated appropriate from inappropriate empathic responses.…”

“…The third issue concerns the possible relationship between alexithymia and the identification of appropriate empathic responses, an association that has received considerable attention in recent literature on emotion processing in autism (e.g., Cook et al, 2013; Fletcher‐Watson & Bird, 2020). Practical constraints on the number of measures included in our study meant that our study cannot speak to this issue, but we note two points, the first previously highlighted in Brewer et al's (2022) study of metacognitive awareness in autistic adults. Huggins et al (2021) used a behavioral measure of emotional self‐awareness rather than one of the commonly used self‐report alexithymia instruments that have consistently suggested poorer emotional self‐awareness in autistic than non‐autistic individuals.…”

“…The second component involved examination of metacognitive awareness of emotion recognition accuracy. It provided no evidence of lesser metacognitive awareness in autistic than non‐autistic adults, although pre‐task confidence for the former was significantly lower (Brewer et al, 2022). Autistic individuals discriminated accurate from inaccurate recognition responses as effectively as non‐autistic individuals, although again there was substantial within‐group variability.…”

“…To examine metacognitive awareness of the appropriateness of empathic responses, confidence judgments provided by participants after each response were used to compute confidence‐appropriateness Gamma ( G ) rank correlation coefficients for individual participants in each group (Goodman & Kruskal, 1954), thereby permitting examination of inter‐individual variability and group differences in the discrimination of appropriate from less appropriate empathic responses. We also derived confidence‐appropriateness calibration curves—widely used in various domains of decision‐making research (e.g., Brewer et al, 2022; Brewer & Wells, 2006; Maras et al, 2020)—which complement G coefficients by revealing how sensitively participants monitored the appropriateness of their responses to others' emotions. Thus, as well as reporting higher overall confidence in appropriate than inappropriate responses, participants who are finely tuned to the appropriateness of their empathic responses should be characterized by calibration curves that indicate systematic increases in appropriateness of responses that parallel progressive increases in the confidence expressed in the appropriateness of those responses.…”

Decision-making in autism: A narrative review

“…Two of these articles found that autistic people had reduced explicit, but not implicit, metacognitive ability (Carpenter et al, 2019; Nicholson et al, 2019). One article found that overall calibration (agreement between correct responses and confidence) was equivalent between the autistic and comparison groups; but autistic participants showed lower initial confidence and tended to display less under- and over-confidence than comparison participants (Brewer et al, 2022). Finally, three articles (23.1%) found additional support for intact implicit uncertainty monitoring in autism.…”