Response to McKenzie et al. 2021: Keep It Simple; Young Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Intellectual Disability Can Process Basic Emotions.

This research commentary suggests that autistic young adults without intellectual disability can understand basic emotions well when they use their thinking skills to help them. However, they may still find it harder to understand complex or subtle emotions. The authors are building on other research to show this difference between simple and complex emotion understanding in autism.

This commentary responds to McKenzie et al.'s 2021 research on empathic accuracy in autism. The authors propose a theoretical framework suggesting that young adults with autism spectrum disorder without intellectual disability can successfully process basic emotions when they can recruit their cognitive abilities. However, they may continue to experience difficulties with complex or subtle emotional processing. The commentary extends previous findings from their laboratory to support this distinction between simple and complex emotion processing in autism, noting that McKenzie et al.'s work demonstrated this pattern across both visual and auditory modalities in video clips.

Interventions should distinguish between basic and complex emotion processing. Cognitive-based approaches may be effective for teaching basic emotion recognition. Additional support strategies needed for subtle emotional nuances. Multimodal training approaches recommended.

This is a commentary paper without new empirical data. The findings are based on interpretation of existing research rather than direct investigation. Sample characteristics and methodology details are not provided, limiting ability to assess generalizability.

We recently read the interesting and informative paper entitled "Empathic accuracy and cognitive and affective empathy in young adults with and without autism spectrum disorder" (McKenzie et al. in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 52: 1-15, 2021). This paper expands recent findings from our lab (Ben-David in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 50: 741-756, 2020a; International Journal of Audiology 60: 319-321, 2020b) and a recent theoretical framework (Icht et al. in Autism Research 14: 1948-1964, 2021) that may suggest a new purview for McKenzie et al.'s results. Namely, these papers suggest that young adults with autism spectrum disorder without intellectual disability can successfully recruit their cognitive abilities to distinguish between different simple spoken emotions, but may still face difficulties processing complex, subtle emotions. McKenzie et al. (Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 52: 1-15, 2021) extended these findings to the processing of emotions in video clips, with both visual and auditory information.