Misinterpretation of facial expressions of emotion in verbal adults with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Facial emotion perception is significantly affected in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet little is known about how individuals with ASD misinterpret facial expressions that result in their difficulty in accurately recognizing emotion in faces. This study examined facial emotion perception in 45 verbal adults with ASD and 30 age- and gender-matched volunteers without ASD to identify patterns of emotion misinterpretation during face processing that contribute to emotion recognition impairments in autism. Results revealed that difficulty distinguishing emotional from neutral facial expressions characterized much of the emotion perception impairments exhibited by participants with ASD. In particular, adults with ASD uniquely misinterpreted happy faces as neutral, and were significantly more likely than typical volunteers to attribute negative valence to non-emotional faces. The over-attribution of emotions to neutral faces was significantly related to greater communication and emotional intelligence impairments in individuals with ASD. These findings suggest a potential negative bias toward the interpretation of facial expressions and may have implications for interventions designed to remediate emotion perception in ASD.

Social‐cognitive, physiological, and neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation impairments: understanding anxiety in autism spectrum disorder

“…Kuusikko and colleagues (2009) found that youth with ASD were more likely than peers without ASD to perceive ambiguous faces as portraying negative emotions, suggesting biased interpretations. Eack et al (2014) similarly found that adults with ASD perceived neutral faces as negative whereas typically developing adults did not. In summary, in the presence of atypical visual attending to the environment ‐ specifically aversion to social stimuli and bias toward threat cues, ER impairments may be expressed as anxiety.…”

Wanting it Too Much: An Inverse Relation Between Social Motivation and Facial Emotion Recognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…It has been shown that emotion processing in adolescents is similar to adults but not quite mature yet [74]. While some previous studies [3, 75] did not find impairment in emotion recognition in adolescents, a number have noted impairment even in adults with ASD [76, 77]. Additionally, Kuusikko et al [78] noted that older youth (12 and up) with ASD differed more from their typical peers in FER ability than younger youth with ASD.…”

Social cognition as a predictor of functional and social skills in autistic adults without intellectual disability

“…A variety of social skills programs have been developed for autistic adults, under the assumption that improving social understanding and ability will improve functional outcomes [Eack et al, 2013;Spain & Blainey, 2015]. Because autistic adults without intellectual disability often perform poorly on measures of social cognition [Morrison et al, 2019;Velikonja, Fett, & Velthorst, 2019], including in the areas of social attention [Pelphrey et al, 2002;Sasson et al, 2007], affect recognition [Eack, Mazefsky, & Minshew, 2015], and advanced theory of mind [Baron-Cohen, Jolliffe, Mortimore, & Robertson, 1997], programs often focus on social cognition and explicitly teach strategies for improving performance Kandalaft, Didehbani, Krawczyk, Allen, & Chapman, 2013;Koegel, Ashbaugh, Navab, & Koegel, 2016;Turner-Brown, Perry, Dichter, Bodfish, & Penn, 2008]. Indeed, these programs often do improve performance on specific tasks [Bishop-Fitzpatrick, Minshew, & Eack, 2014;Kandalaft et al, 2013;Koegel et al, 2016], and confer other benefits like increasing knowledge about social skills [Gates, Kang, & Lerner, 2017] and facilitating friendship development when a peer group component is included [Spain & Blainey, 2015].…”