Typical integration of emotion cues from bodies and faces in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autistic adults exhibit typical sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance

The visual processing differences seen in autism often impede individuals' visual perception of the social world. In particular, many autistic people exhibit poor face recognition. Here, we sought to determine whether autistic adults also show impaired perception of dyadic social interactions-a class of stimulus thought to engage face-like visual processing. Our focus was the perception of interpersonal distance. Participants completed distance change detection tasks, in which they had to make perceptual decisions about the distance between two actors. On half of the trials, participants judged whether the actors moved closer together; on the other half, whether they moved further apart. In a nonsocial control task, participants made similar judgments about two grandfather clocks. We also assessed participants' face recognition ability using standardized measures. The autistic and nonautistic observers showed similar levels of perceptual sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance when viewing social interactions. As expected, however, the autistic observers showed clear signs of impaired face recognition. Despite putative similarities between the visual processing of faces and dyadic social interactions, our results suggest that these two facets of social vision may dissociate.

Recognition of facial expressions in autism: Effects of face masks and alexithymia

It is often assumed that the recognition of facial expressions is impaired in autism. However, recent evidence suggests that reports of expression recognition difficulties in autistic participants may be attributable to co-occurring alexithymia-a trait associated with difficulties interpreting interoceptive and emotional states-not autism per se. Due to problems fixating on the eye-region, autistic individuals may be more reliant on information from the mouth region when judging facial expressions. As such, it may be easier to detect expression recognition deficits attributable to autism, not alexithymia, when participants are forced to base expression judgements on the eye-region alone. To test this possibility, we compared the ability of autistic participants (with and without high levels of alexithymia) and non-autistic controls to categorise facial expressions (a) when the whole face was visible, and (b) when the lower portion of the face was covered with a surgical mask. High-alexithymic autistic participants showed clear evidence of expression recognition difficulties: they correctly categorised fewer expressions than non-autistic controls. In contrast, low-alexithymic autistic participants were unimpaired relative to non-autistic controls. The same pattern of results was seen when judging masked and unmasked expression stimuli. In sum, we find no evidence for an expression recognition deficit attributable to autism, in the absence of high levels of co-occurring alexithymia, either when participants judge whole-face stimuli or just the eye-region. These findings underscore the influence of co-occurring alexithymia on expression recognition in autism.

Facial masks affect emotion recognition in the general population and individuals with autistic traits

Facial expressions, and the ability to recognize these expressions, have evolved in humans to communicate information to one another. Face masks are equipment used in healthcare by health professionals to prevent the transmission of airborne infections. As part of the social distancing efforts related to COVID-19, wearing facial masks has been practiced globally. Such practice might influence affective information communication among humans. Previous research suggests that masks disrupt expression recognition of some emotions (e.g., fear, sadness or neutrality) and lower the confidence in their identification. To extend the previous research, in the current study we tested a larger and more diverse sample of individuals and also investigated the effect of masks on perceived intensity of expressions. Moreover, for the first time in the literature we examined these questions using individuals with autistic traits. Specifically, across three experiments using different populations (college students and general population), and the 10-item Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ-10; lower and higher scorers), we tested the effect of facial masks on facial emotion recognition of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutrality. Results showed that the ability to identify all facial expressions decreased when faces were masked, a finding observed across all three studies, contradicting previous research on fear, sad, and neutral expressions. Participants were also less confident in their judgements for all emotions, supporting previous research; and participants perceived emotions as less expressive in the mask condition compared to the unmasked condition, a finding novel to the literature. An additional novel finding was that participants with higher scores on the AQ-10 were less accurate and less confident overall in facial expression recognition, as well as perceiving expressions as less intense. Our findings reveal that wearing face masks decreases facial expression recognition, confidence in expression identification, as well as the perception of intensity for all expressions, affecting high-scoring AQ-10 individuals more than low-scoring individuals.

Children cannot ignore what they hear: Incongruent emotional information leads to an auditory dominance in children

Effective emotion recognition is imperative to successfully navigating social situations. Research suggests differing developmental trajectories for the recognition of bodily and vocal emotion, but emotions are usually studied in isolation and rarely considered as multimodal stimuli in the literature. When adults are presented with basic multimodal sensory stimuli, the Colavita effect suggests that they have a visual dominance, whereas more recent research finds that an auditory sensory dominance may be present in children under 8 years of age. However, it is not currently known whether this phenomenon holds for more complex multimodal social stimuli. Here we presented children and adults with multimodal social stimuli consisting of emotional bodies and voices, asking them to recognize the emotion in one modality while ignoring the other. We found that adults can perform this task with no detrimental effects on performance regardless of whether the ignored emotion was congruent or not. However, children find it extremely challenging to recognize bodily emotion while trying to ignore incongruent vocal emotional information. In several instances, they performed below chance level, indicating that the auditory modality actively informs their choice of bodily emotion. Therefore, this is the first evidence, to our knowledge, of an auditory dominance in children when presented with emotionally meaningful stimuli.

Emotional self-awareness in autism: A meta-analysis of group differences and developmental effects

LAY ABSTRACT

Autistic people are thought to have difficulties with identifying and understanding their own emotions. This is referred to as emotional self-awareness. It is important to study emotional self-awareness as people who are more able to understand their own emotions, whether they are autistic or not, are more able to respond to them appropriately, as well as to identify them in other people. It has not yet been confirmed whether autistic people have difficulties with emotional self-awareness, or if any reported difficulties are actually due to the way in which emotional self-awareness is measured in autistic people. If these difficulties do exist, it is also not known when these difficulties emerge. In this research, we reviewed 47 existing studies that measured emotional self-awareness in autistic and non-autistic adults and children. We also compared studies that measured emotional self-awareness in different ways. We found that autistic adults did seem to have poorer emotional self-awareness compared to their neurotypical peers. However, this was not the case with autistic children of age 12 years and below. Instead, differences in emotional self-awareness only seemed to emerge during adolescence. Moreover, these difficulties seemed to increase with age. These results suggest that difficulties with emotional self-awareness may not be inherent in autism. Instead, they may emerge alongside the greater social and mental health difficulties that are experienced by many autistic people during adolescence. We therefore suggest that it is important to find out more about, and subsequently support, the emotional self-awareness difficulties that autistic adolescents may encounter.

Autism, autistic traits and creativity: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Psychometric, historiometric and psychiatric studies are controversial on a hypothetical link between psychopathology and creativity. In this study, we will try to contribute to this debate by analysing the case of autism. Is there a relationship between autism and creativity? If so, can we find the same relationship in a watered-down form in subjects with autistic traits? In order to answer these questions, we carried out a systematic literature review of the studies on this topic published in the last 10 years. We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. We also conducted a meta-analysis of data. We found that in the clinical population there are fewer creative performances than in control groups; nonetheless, it is possible to delineate a medium creative profile of subjects with autism. The average creative profile of people with autism shows that they are inhibited in fluency and flexibility, but that they display a high level of detail and a particularly high level of originality in works either generated during tests or created in private time. In particular, the level of detail reached in the latter condition seems to be higher in the autistic population than in the control groups. Better linguistic skills appear to be linked to better creative performances. Linguistic tests, if compared with visual and performative tests, seem to favour the expression of originality in subjects with autism. Although our data on autistic traits are compatible with the hypothesis that a high level of autistic traits is a watered-down replica of the cognitive profile of subjects with autism, we have no sufficient data to support this hypothesis.

Brief Report: Autistic Adults Assign Less Weight to Affective Cues When Judging Others' Ambiguous Emotional States

Understanding other people's emotional states involves integrating multiple sources of information, such as someone's smile (affective cue) with our knowledge that they have passed an exam (situational cue). We explored whether autistic adults display differences in how they integrate these cues by showing participants videos of students receiving their exams results. Our results suggest autistic adults generally perform as neurotypical participants when identifying and integrating affective and situational cues. It was only in certain unfamiliar and ambiguous social situations that autistic adults assigned less weight to affective cues compared to situational cues when judging other people's emotional states.

Removing Hand Form Information Specifically Impairs Emotion Recognition for Fearful and Angry Body Stimuli

Emotion perception research has largely been dominated by work on facial expressions, but emotion is also strongly conveyed from the body. Research exploring emotion recognition from the body tends to refer to “the body” as a whole entity. However, the body is made up of different components (hands, arms, trunk, etc.), all of which could be differentially contributing to emotion recognition. We know that the hands can help to convey actions and, in particular, are important for social communication through gestures, but we currently do not know to what extent the hands influence emotion recognition from the body. Here, 93 adults viewed static emotional body stimuli with either the hands, arms, or both components removed and completed a forced-choice emotion recognition task. Removing the hands significantly reduced recognition accuracy for fear and anger but made no significant difference to the recognition of happiness and sadness. Removing the arms had no effect on emotion recognition accuracy compared with the full-body stimuli. These results suggest the hands may play a key role in the recognition of emotions from the body.

Face perception in autism spectrum disorder: Modulation of holistic processing by facial emotion

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD; autistic individuals) may exhibit atypical face perception because they fail to process faces holistically. In the context of this hypothesis, it is critical to determine whether autistic individuals exhibit diminished susceptibility to the composite face illusion, widely regarded as a key marker of holistic face processing. To date, however, previous studies have yielded inconsistent findings. In light of recent evidence suggesting that facial emotion cues increase the strength of the composite face illusion in typical individuals, the present study sought to determine whether the presence of facial emotion also modulates the strength of the composite face illusion in autistic individuals, many of whom experience difficulties recognizing facial expressions. We therefore measured composite face effects in a sample of autistic individuals (N = 20) and matched typical controls (N = 29) using an incidental emotion procedure in which distractor regions varied systematically in their emotion strength. As expected, the presence of facial emotion in the distractor regions of composite face arrangements increased the strength of the illusory distortion induced. The extent of the modulation by facial emotion was similar in the two groups. The composite effects seen in the ASD group were qualitatively and quantitatively similar to those seen in the typical group, suggestive of intact holistic processing in this population.

Adaptation to different communicative contexts: an eye tracking study of autistic adults

Background

Learning through social observation (i.e., watching other people interact) lays the foundation for later social skills and social cognition. However, social situations are often complex, and humans are only capable of attending to one aspect of a scene at a time. How do people choose where to allocate their visual resources when viewing complex social scenarios? For typically developing (TD) individuals, faces are often given priority. Depending upon context, however, it may be more useful to attend to other aspects of the environment, such as hands, tools, or background objects. Previous studies reported reduced face looking in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but modulation of visual attention in response to contextual differences (e.g., according to social richness, or the presence/absence of communicative behaviors between two people) has only briefly been explored. In this study, we used eye-tracking technology to test the extent to which ASD adults and TD adults use social context to guide their gaze behavior.

Methods

Fifty-five adults participated (28 with ASD). The location and duration of participants’ gaze were recorded while they watched a series of naturalistic social videos. Half of the videos depicted two people engaging in non-verbal communication (rich social scenes) while playing with toys. The other half depicted two people playing with toys separately, not interacting with each other (lean social scenes).

Results

ASD and TD adults both increased their attention to faces in communicative contexts (rich social scenes) as compared to non-communicative contexts (lean social scenes). However, TD adults increased their attention to faces significantly more when watching two people communicate than did ASD adults, who increased their attention to a lesser degree. Further analysis revealed that ASD adults persisted in looking at hands and toys, even when observing two people communicate in a rich social scene.

Conclusions

Diminished gaze to faces when observing two people communicating may lead to fewer opportunities for social learning and subsequent reductions in social knowledge. Naturalistic measures of contextual modulation could help identify areas of need for individuals learning about the social world and could become treatment targets to improve everyday social learning.

Communicative misalignment in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Communication deficits are a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), manifest during social interactions. Previous studies investigating communicative deficits have largely focused on the perceptual biases, social motivation, cognitive flexibility, or mentalizing abilities of isolated individuals. By embedding autistic individuals in live non-verbal interactions, we characterized a novel cause for their communication deficits. Adults with ASD matched neurotypical individuals in their ability and propensity to generate and modify intelligible behaviors for a communicative partner. However, they struggled to align the meaning of those behaviors with their partner when meaning required referencing their recent communicative history. This communicative misalignment explains why autistic individuals are vulnerable in everyday interactions, which entail fleeting ambiguities, but succeed in social cognition tests involving stereotyped contextual cues. These findings illustrate the cognitive and clinical importance of considering social interaction as a communicative alignment challenge, and how ineffective human communication is without this key interactional ingredient.

Closed Loop Deep Brain Stimulation for PTSD, Addiction, and Disorders of Affective Facial Interpretation: Review and Discussion of Potential Biomarkers and Stimulation Paradigms

The treatment of psychiatric diseases with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is becoming more of a reality as studies proliferate the indications and targets for therapies. Opinions on the initial failures of DBS trials for some psychiatric diseases point to a certain lack of finesse in using an Open Loop DBS (OLDBS) system in these dynamic, cyclical pathologies. OLDBS delivers monomorphic input into dysfunctional brain circuits with modulation of that input via human interface at discrete time points with no interim modulation or adaptation to the changing circuit dynamics. Closed Loop DBS (CLDBS) promises dynamic, intrinsic circuit modulation based on individual physiologic biomarkers of dysfunction. Discussed here are several psychiatric diseases which may be amenable to CLDBS paradigms as the neurophysiologic dysfunction is stochastic and not static. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has several peripheral and central physiologic and neurologic changes preceding stereotyped hyper-activation behavioral responses. Biomarkers for CLDBS potentially include skin conductance changes indicating changes in the sympathetic nervous system, changes in serum and central neurotransmitter concentrations, and limbic circuit activation. Chemical dependency and addiction have been demonstrated to be improved with both ablation and DBS of the Nucleus Accumbens and as a serendipitous side effect of movement disorder treatment. Potential peripheral biomarkers are similar to those proposed for PTSD with possible use of environmental and geolocation based cues, peripheral signs of physiologic arousal, and individual changes in central circuit patterns. Non-substance addiction disorders have also been serendipitously treated in patients with OLDBS for movement disorders. As more is learned about these behavioral addictions, DBS targets and effectors will be identified. Finally, discussed is the use of facial recognition software to modulate activation of inappropriate responses for psychiatric diseases in which misinterpretation of social cues feature prominently. These include Autism Spectrum Disorder, PTSD, and Schizophrenia-all of which have a common feature of dysfunctional interpretation of facial affective clues. Technological advances and improvements in circuit-based, individual-specific, real-time adaptable modulation, forecast functional neurosurgery treatments for heretofore treatment-resistant behavioral diseases.