Facial emotion recognition in autistic adult females correlates with alexithymia, not autism.
Louise Ola, Fiona Gullon-Scott
PMID 32689812WHAT IT FOUND
In autistic women, difficulty recognising their own emotions and an outward focus were associated with poorer ability to identify others' emotions.
Autism severity was not associated with accuracy, and neither was associated with speed.
Key findings
01Average emotion recognition accuracy was 54.1%, and higher alexithymia was associated with poorer accuracy while autism severity was not.
02Difficulty identifying feelings and externally oriented thinking were linked to poorer accuracy; difficulty describing feelings was not.
03Alexithymia and autism severity were not associated with how quickly emotions were identified.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study did not include non-autistic women, so it cannot show whether autistic women recognise emotions differently from women without autism. Diagnosis was self-reported online and not verified, and the autism questionnaire used is not a diagnostic tool. Recruitment through autism groups may have attracted women already struggling with emotion recognition, and the study did not collect enough background information to know who the results apply to. The design measured associations at one time point, so it cannot show that alexithymia causes poorer emotion recognition. Self-report measures of alexithymia may have missed some cases because people with autism or alexithymia can find it hard to describe their own emotions. The emotion recognition task used short video clips, which are more realistic than static photos but still not real-life interaction.
Declared interests
No financial support was reported for the research, authorship or publication. Participants could enter a prize draw funded by Newcastle University.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that autism severity causes emotion recognition difficulties in autistic women. The study was correlational, did not include non-autistic controls, and alexithymia, not autism severity, was associated with accuracy.