Non-autistic adults can recognize posed autistic facial expressions: Implications for internal representations of emotion.

This research looked at whether autistic and non-autistic people have different ideas about what emotions should look like on faces. Scientists had college students look at posed facial expressions from both autistic and non-autistic people. Surprisingly, students were often better at recognizing emotions from autistic expressions. This suggests the problem isn't that autistic people express emotions 'wrong' - the misunderstandings that happen in real life probably have other causes.

This study challenged assumptions about why autistic people's emotional expressions are sometimes misunderstood. Across three studies with 632 non-autistic college students, researchers found that participants could actually recognize posed autistic facial expressions more accurately than non-autistic expressions in some conditions. Study 2 revealed autistic expressions were more intense and better examples of intended emotions. However, Study 3 showed no consistent differences when both groups could see themselves making expressions.

The findings suggest that different internal representations of emotions between neurotypes may not be the primary cause of emotional misunderstandings in real-world interactions.

Results suggest that therapeutic interventions focusing on 'correcting' autistic emotional expressions may be misguided. Instead, support should focus on improving mutual understanding and communication strategies between neurotypes in naturalistic social contexts.

Limited to posed expressions rather than spontaneous emotions, used only non-autistic college student judges, and findings may not generalize to real-world social interactions where misunderstandings commonly occur.

Autistic people report that their emotional expressions are sometimes misunderstood by non-autistic people. One explanation for these misunderstandings could be that the two neurotypes have different internal representations of emotion: Perhaps they have different expectations about what a facial expression showing a particular emotion looks like. In three well-powered studies with non-autistic college students in the United States (total N = 632), we investigated this possibility. In Study 1, participants recognized most facial expressions posed by autistic individuals more accurately than those posed by non-autistic individuals.

Study 2 showed that one reason the autistic expressions were recognized more accurately was because they were better and more intense examples of the intended expressions than the non-autistic expressions. In Study 3, we used a set of expressions created by autistic and non-autistic individuals who could see their faces as they made the expressions, which could allow them to explicitly match the expression they produced with their internal representation of that emotional expression. Here, neither autistic expressions nor non-autistic expressions were consistently recognized more accurately. In short, these findings suggest that differences in internal representations of what emotional expressions look like are unlikely to play a major role in explaining why non-autistic people sometimes misunderstand the emotions autistic people are experiencing.