Learn more about facial expression recognition here: https://www.facebook.com/autisticnottingham/posts/10158396709027634Learn more about alexithymia here: https://www.facebook.com/autisticnottingham/posts/10157820205662634(Did you know that we are not-for-profit? So when you donate, all of your donation goes straight back into the work we do for the Nottinghamshire autistic community! You can donate here: https://cafdonate.cafonline.org/16400#!/DonationDetails)

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Full paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/…/10.1177/1362361320932727

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Who: Ola & Gullon-Scott
Journal: Autism
Published: 2020
Title: Facial emotion recognition in autistic adult females correlates with alexithymia, not autism

Facial Expression Recognition

Autistic children show less interest in faces, and autistic adults while autistic adults have less activation of the area of the brain related to recognising faces during face matching tasks.

Are autistic people less able to identify facial emotion in others?

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So far, research into autistic peoples ability to recognise emotion from faces is inconsistent. This might be to do with the type of task performed. For example, identifying emotion from a static face isn’t something we do in real life, because facial expressions are dynamic.

This isn’t what emotions look like in real life!

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Alexithymia is a subclinical condition which means you struggle to identify, name, and communicate your own emotions.

They surveyed 83 autistic females to measure their autistic traits, their alexithymic traits, and their ability to recognise emotions from facial expressions from video clips.

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The participants who had more alexithymia traits, who struggled to identify their own emotions, had a harder time identifying other peoples emotions from the facial expressions.

Facial emotion recognition was not related to autism traits, it was related to alexithymia traits.