What Is Wrong with Emotion Processing in Autism?

Background:

Early experimental research suggested that children with autism have severe difficulties in recognising and experiencing all types of emotion (e.g., Hobson et al., 1988).  More recently, it has been suggested that high-functioning individuals (with IQs over 70) have difficulties in recognising/experiencing so-called “social emotions” (e.g., embarrassment) only, but not “basic emotions” (e.g., happiness) (Heerey et al., 2003).  However, recently even this assumption has been challenged.  Hobson et al. (2006), for instance, found little evidence to suggest that children with autism fail to recognise the social emotions pride and guilt in experimental settings.   Given that emotion processing deficits are thought to be core to autism (e.g., Lord et al., 1999), it is remarkable that experimental studies have not more uniformly discovered such deficits.   

Objectives:

This study aimed to assess the ability of individuals with and without autism to:

(a) recognise, in others, expressions of “simple” emotions (happiness, sadness, fear), “complex” emotions (disappointment, surprise, disgust), and “self-conscious” emotions (pride, embarrassment, guilt), and; (b) report their own previous experiences of these emotions. 

If experiencing and recognising social emotions is dependent on the same underlying psychological processes, and if these processes are impaired in autism, then recognition and reporting abilities should be correlated amongst comparison participants, but not participants with autism.

Methods:

Twenty-one individuals with autism and 21 age- and ability-matched developmentally disabled participants took part.  For the recognition aspect of the study, participants watched nine silent, five-second video clips, each of an actor expressing a different emotion.  Stimuli were taken from ‘Mind Reading: An Interactive Guide to Emotions’ (Baron-Cohen, 2004), which provided standardised expressions of each emotion.  After each clip, the participant stated what emotion they believed was expressed by the actor.  

For the self-report aspect of the study, participants were asked to define each of the nine emotions and to provide a description of a time in which they had experienced each.  Self-reports of emotion experiences were rated on a scale of 0 to 2, according to their appropriateness and richness.

Results:

In line with predictions, amongst each group of participants, social emotions were significantly more difficult to describe in self and to recognise in others than either simple or complex emotions (all ps < .005, all rs > .42).  Also, independent of age and verbal ability, the ability to report experiences of social emotions was correlated with the ability to recognise social emotions in others amongst participants with autism (r = .70, p = .003) and developmental disability (r = .47, p = .04).  There were, however, no significant between-group differences in either emotion recognition or emotion reporting (all ps > .49, all rs < .13).

Conclusions:

These results might lead us to question the nature and/or severity of emotion processing deficits amongst people with autism.  We will discuss the possibility that individuals with autism implement compensatory strategies to perform well in experimental settings despite atypical emotion-processing competence, noting however that this suggestion is contra-indicated in the current study by the similar correlations between recognising and reporting social emotions amongst each participant group.