Perception of emotions from facial expressions in high-functioning adults with autism
Open accessAbstract
Impairment in social communication is one of the diagnostic hallmarks of autism spectrum disorders, and a large body of research has documented aspects of impaired social cognition in autism, both at the level of the processes and the neural structures involved. Yet one of the most common social communicative abilities in everyday life, the ability to judge somebody's emotion from their facial expression, has yielded conflicting findings. To investigate this issue, we used a sensitive task that has been used to assess facial emotion perception in a number of neurological and psychiatric populations. Fifteen high-functioning adults with autism and 19 control participants rated the emotional intensity of 36 faces displaying basic emotions. Every face was rated 6 times-once for each emotion category. The autism group gave ratings that were significantly less sensitive to a given emotion, and less reliable across repeated testing, resulting in overall decreased specificity in emotion perception. We thus demonstrate a subtle but specific pattern of impairments in facial emotion perception in people with autism.
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Individuals with ASD are less sensitive to both positively and negatively valenced social information.
“Individuals with ASD are less sensitive to both positively and negatively valenced social information.42, 64, 65”
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- Authors
- Kennedy, D. P., & Adolphs, R.
- Affiliations
- California Institute of Technology (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kennedy, Daniel P.
- Adolphs, Ralph
- Venue
- Neuropsychologia
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2012-12
- Volume
- 50
- Issue
- 14
- Pages
- 3313-3319
- ISSN
- 0028-3932 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3518664
- OpenAlex
- W2118698102
- Cited by
- 115
- References
- 33
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 11 · 2013: 2 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 3.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Neuropsychologia (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Simons Foundation (SFARI-07-01)
- National Institute of Mental Health (K99 MH094409)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Autism Spectrum Disorder Research
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Keywords
- autism spectrum disorder, emotional face processing, high-functioning adults, social cognition, social communication deficits, test-retest reliability, basic emotions
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Analysis of Variance, Autistic Disorder, Facial Expression, Female, Humans, Male, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Reaction Time, Case-Control Studies, Mood Disorders, Young Adult
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