Impaired Recognition of Basic Emotions from Facial Expressions in Young People with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Assessing the Importance of Expression Intensity.
Sarah Griffiths, Christopher Jarrold, Ian S Penton-Voak and 3 others
PMID 28361375WHAT IT FOUND
Young people with autism were less accurate than controls at recognising emotions from faces, but this difference disappeared once verbal and non-verbal reasoning abilities were accounted for.
Low-intensity expressions were too ambiguous for both groups to identify reliably.
Key findings
01Participants with ASD showed lower emotion recognition accuracy than controls in unadjusted analyses, but this group difference was not significant after adjusting for vocabulary, reasoning, and gender.
02When very low-intensity expressions (which both groups failed to recognise) were excluded from the analysis, participants with ASD remained less accurate than controls for anger, disgust, happiness, and sadness.
03There was no significant correlation between emotion recognition performance and parent-reported social functioning scores in either the ASD or control group.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
High attrition rate: 30% of participants with ASD dropped out after starting the task, potentially biasing the sample towards those who found the task easier. The study did not achieve its intended sample size, resulting in 72% power (below the 80% standard). Diagnoses were based on parent report rather than gold-standard observational measures like the ADOS. Online testing meant that environmental factors and adherence to instructions (e.g., not looking at the screen) could not be strictly controlled. The ASD group had a much higher proportion of males (88%) compared to the control group (50%), although gender was included as a covariate.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that young people with autism have a specific deficit in recognising low-intensity facial expressions. The study found that both groups performed poorly at these levels due to floor effects, and the main impairment was evident across higher intensities. Furthermore, do not assume the group difference in emotion recognition is purely social; it was not statistically significant once verbal and non-verbal reasoning abilities were accounted for.