Facing up to others' emotions: No evidence of autism-related deficits in metacognitive awareness of emotion recognition.
Neil Brewer, Carmen A Lucas, Marie Antonia Georgopoulos and 1 others
PMID 35796161WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic adults recognized emotions less accurately than non-autistic adults but were just as good at judging whether their own answers were right.
Their slower responses likely reflect caution rather than a deficit in understanding their own limitations.
Key findings
01Autistic and non-autistic adults showed similar ability to discriminate between their correct and incorrect emotion recognition responses.
02Calibration curves for both groups were virtually identical, indicating similar sensitivity to fluctuations in their own accuracy.
03Autistic adults were significantly less confident in their emotion recognition abilities before the task began compared to non-autistic adults.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The non-autistic group was significantly younger than the autistic group, although age analyses found no effect on metacognitive scores. The study used a laboratory task with static and dynamic images, which may not reflect the complexity of real-world social interactions. The results are correlational and cannot determine why autistic individuals were slower or less confident before the task.
Declared interests
Funded by the Australian Research Council. No other conflicts of interest are reported in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of metacognitive deficit as evidence that autistic individuals recognize emotions accurately. The study found that while they know when they are wrong, their actual recognition accuracy was lower than the non-autistic group's.