Seven- to 11-Year-Olds' Developing Ability to Recognize Natural Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions

Autism and the double empathy problem: Implications for development and mental health

This article proposes a link between autistic people being misperceived by the neurotypical majority and their being at risk of poor mental health and well-being. We present a transactional account of development in which the misperceptions (and consequent behaviour) of the neurotypical majority influences the perceptions and behaviour of autistic people such that they become increasingly separate and indeed isolated from mainstream society. This jeopardizes their mental health and prevents autistic people from developing to full potential. The situation is not only problematical for the development of autistic people but is also to the detriment of wider society, in so far as autistic people are effectively prevented from contributing fully. This account assumes that some (not necessarily all) autistic people yearn to be included, to be productive and to be useful. It thus directly opposes accounts that view autism as an extreme case of diminished social motivation.

Dissociating neural signatures of mental state retrodiction and classification based on facial expressions

Posed facial expressions of actors have often been used as stimuli to induce mental state inferences, in order to investigate ‘Theory of Mind’ processes. However, such stimuli make it difficult to determine whether perceivers are using a basic or more elaborated mentalizing strategy. The current study used as stimuli covert recordings of target individuals who viewed various emotional expressions, which caused them to spontaneously mimic these expressions. Perceivers subsequently judged these subtle emotional expressions of the targets: in one condition (‘classification’) participants were instructed to classify the target’s expression (i.e. match it to a sample) and in another condition (‘retrodicting’) participants were instructed to retrodict (i.e. infer which emotional expression the target was viewing). When instructed to classify, participants showed more prevalent activations in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) at earlier and mid-latency ERP components N170, P200 and P300–600. By contrast, when instructed to retrodict participants showed enhanced late frontal and fronto-temporal ERPs (N800–1000), with more sustained activity over the right than the left hemisphere. These findings reveal different cortical processes involved when retrodicting about a facial expression compared to merely classifying it, despite comparable performance on the behavioral task.

How accurately can other people infer your thoughts-And does culture matter?

This research investigated how accurately people infer what others are thinking after observing a brief sample of their behaviour and whether culture/similarity is a relevant factor. Target participants (14 British and 14 Mediterraneans) were cued to think about either positive or negative events they had experienced. Subsequently, perceiver participants (16 British and 16 Mediterraneans) watched videos of the targets thinking about these things. Perceivers (both groups) were significantly accurate in judging when targets had been cued to think of something positive versus something negative, indicating notable inferential ability. Additionally, Mediterranean perceivers were better than British perceivers in making such inferences, irrespective of nationality of the targets, something that was statistically accounted for by corresponding group differences in levels of independently measured collectivism. The results point to the need for further research to investigate the possibility that being reared in a collectivist culture fosters ability in interpreting others’ behaviour.