New research confirms what autistic people already know
A recent Australian study shows no evidence of autism-related deficits in metacognitive awareness of emotion recognition
It is generally considered by the academic community that autistic individuals may have difficulty recognizing other people's facial emotions. However, little is known about their awareness of any emotion recognition difficulties they may experience. A recent Australian study indicates that, although there is considerable individual variability, autistic adults were as sensitive to variations in the accuracy of their recognition of others' emotions as their non-autistic peers. Who knew?
The study shows that many in positions of influence on autism issues will need to reevaluate their widely held beliefs. You can no longer say that autistic adults experience difficulties with social emotion recognition. Neither do we have a lack of insight into our processing of other people’s facial expressions. These findings were recently published in the journal Autism Research.
In this study, 63 autistic individuals and 67 non-autistic adults (with IQs ranging from 85 to 143) took part in three 5-hour sessions comparing their identification of 12 human facial emotion expressions such as anger and sadness.
The study’s co-author noted, “These findings challenge the notion that [autistic] adults are more likely to be overwhelmed by increasingly dynamic or complex emotional stimuli and to experience difficulties recognizing specific emotions.”
The research also showed that whilst there was considerable variability in terms of individuals’ insight into their interpretation of others’ emotions, there was no evidence of any differences between the autistic and non-autistic samples.
Again, the co-author notes, “The sophisticated methodologies used in these studies not only help refine our understanding of emotion processing in autism but also provide further demonstrations of hitherto unacknowledged capabilities of autistic individuals.”
Fancy that …
Most of the research I have seen treats the subject as the spectrum is a novel virus. It has been in plain sight since the beginning of humankind. Still, labels are more accessible to come rather than the logic of what they perceive as abnormal is another variation, just the color of the hair or eyes (genetic).