Georgopoulos Marie Antonia, Brewer Neil, Lucas Carmen A, Young Robyn L
College of Education, Psychology & Social Work, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia.
Autism Res. 2022 Sep;15(9):1686-1697. doi: 10.1002/aur.2713. Epub 2022 Mar 26.
Emotion recognition difficulties are considered to contribute to social-communicative problems for autistic individuals. Prior research has been dominated by a focus on forced-choice recognition response accuracy for static face presentations of basic emotions, often involving small samples. Using free-report and multiple-choice response formats, we compared emotion recognition in IQ-matched autistic (N = 63) and nonautistic (N = 67) adult samples using 12 face emotion stimuli presented in three different stimulus formats (static, dynamic, social) that varied the degree of accompanying contextual information. Percent agreement with normative recognition responses (usually labeled "recognition accuracy") was slightly lower for autistic adults. Both groups displayed marked inter-individual variability and, although there was considerable overlap between groups, a very small subset of autistic individuals recorded lower percent agreement than any of the nonautistic sample. Overall, autistic individuals were significantly slower to respond and less confident. Although stimulus type, response format, and emotion affected percent agreement, latency and confidence, their interactions with group were nonsignificant and the associated effect sizes extremely small. The findings challenge notions that autistic adults have core deficits in emotion recognition and are more likely than nonautistic adults to be overwhelmed by increasingly dynamic or complex emotion stimuli and to experience difficulties recognizing specific emotions. Suggested research priorities include clarifying whether longer recognition latencies reflect fundamental processing limitations or adjustable strategic influences, probing age-related changes in emotion recognition across adulthood, and identifying the links between difficulties highlighted by traditional emotion recognition paradigms and real-world social functioning. LAY SUMMARY: It is generally considered that autistic individuals are less accurate than nonautistic individuals at recognizing other people's facial emotions. Using a wide array of emotions presented in various contexts, this study suggests that autistic individuals are, on average, only slightly less accurate but at the same time somewhat slower when classifying others' emotions. However, there was considerable overlap between the two groups, and great variability between individuals. The differences between groups prevailed regardless of how stimuli were presented, the response required or the particular emotion.
情绪识别困难被认为是导致自闭症个体社交沟通问题的一个因素。先前的研究主要集中在对基本情绪的静态面部表情进行强制选择识别反应的准确性上，样本量往往较小。我们采用自由报告和多项选择的反应格式，使用呈现三种不同刺激形式（静态、动态、社交）的12种面部情绪刺激，比较了智商匹配的自闭症成年样本（N = 63）和非自闭症成年样本（N = 67）的情绪识别，这三种刺激形式的伴随情境信息程度各不相同。自闭症成年人与标准识别反应的一致率（通常标记为“识别准确率”）略低。两组都表现出明显的个体间差异，尽管两组之间有相当大的重叠，但一小部分自闭症个体的一致率低于任何非自闭症样本。总体而言，自闭症个体的反应明显更慢且信心更低。尽管刺激类型、反应格式和情绪会影响一致率、反应潜伏期和信心，但它们与组别的交互作用不显著，相关效应量极小。这些发现挑战了自闭症成年人在情绪识别方面存在核心缺陷，并且比非自闭症成年人更可能被日益动态或复杂的情绪刺激所困扰以及在识别特定情绪时遇到困难的观点。建议的研究重点包括阐明更长的识别潜伏期是反映基本加工限制还是可调整的策略影响，探究成年期情绪识别中与年龄相关的变化，以及确定传统情绪识别范式所凸显的困难与现实世界社交功能之间的联系。内容摘要：一般认为，自闭症个体在识别他人面部情绪方面不如非自闭症个体准确。本研究使用在各种情境中呈现的多种情绪表明，自闭症个体在对他人情绪进行分类时，平均而言只是略欠准确，但同时速度也稍慢一些。然而，两组之间有相当大的重叠，个体之间差异很大。无论刺激如何呈现、需要何种反应或特定情绪是什么，组间差异都存在。
