Autistic and non-autistic individuals show the same amygdala activity during emotional face processing.

The task did not require participants to name or judge emotions, so it does not show what happens during explicit emotion recognition. The study was cross-sectional and did not test any therapy, assessment, or intervention. The sample was Dutch adults recruited from an academic clinic, and the authors note the findings may not replicate across countries or ethnic backgrounds. Autistic participants were excluded if they had intellectual disability, mutism, inadequate Dutch, low IQ estimate, psychosis, MRI contraindications, or certain neurological conditions, so the results may not apply to those groups. Some age data were missing and replaced with group means. The Discussion and sample section give different non-autistic participant counts. The paper defines no significant differences using a very liberal statistical criterion. The result applies to one face-matching task and one amygdala contrast, not to all emotion processing tasks or all social communication outcomes.

The study was funded by Mercator Research Center Ruhr and Universitätsklinikum Essen (8912). The article lists research support from non-U.S. government sources and gives no further conflict-of-interest declaration.

Do not read this as proof that autistic adults have no emotion recognition differences. The task did not require emotion recognition, and the authors state that results may not generalise to tasks that require naming emotions.