Face to Face with Autism Facial Expressions

Introduction

In the first study of its kind, researchers will use video clips of spontaneously produced facial expressions in a real-life social context to explore emotion recognition in autism. This research at The University of Nottingham will go beyond the more artificial emotion recognition tasks previously used. The eye movements of volunteers will also be tracked to find out which areas of the face were looked at while volunteers make spontaneous judgments.

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The study is being conducted by Ph.D. student Sarah Cassidy, a member of the Autism Research Team based in the School of Psychology. Her work has been funded through a Ph.D. studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council.

Her work will investigate if people with autism look at faces differently, particularly in the eye region. If so, does this have any relationship with their ability to recognize emotions in others? What is their understanding of emotions in different social contexts? And as a consequence, how difficult is it for them to socialize and communicate with other people

Sarah said:

"Previous research has suggested that people with autism have difficulty inferring emotion from faces due to lack of attention to the eyes and increased attention to the mouth. However, not all studies have shown differences in emotion recognition and eye gaze. There is also little research asking what role reading emotion from the eyes plays in social communication difficulties in autism, with a few studies suggesting a relationship with social competence and responsiveness."

Sarah is looking for volunteers aged 18 and over with autism, autism spectrum disorder, or Asperger's syndrome. She also wants to hear from typically developing people, also over the age of 18, who are interested in helping with her research.

Participants will view 21 video clips of facial expressions and will be asked whether the person in the video received chocolate, monopoly money, or a homemade gift. Each volunteer will have their eye movements measured and will be asked to provide an emotion label for the facial expression. The test will also include logic and vocabulary tasks and an interview and short questionnaire to measure how challenging each volunteer finds socializing and communicating with others.

Sarah's supervisor, Professor Peter Mitchell from the School of Psychology, said:

"The procedures developed by Sarah allow us to investigate how people with autism process social information under conditions that are close to real life. Previous research has been somewhat contrived and unlike real life. High-functioning people with autism tend to perform well on those artificial tasks, and therefore this is not particularly informative about the social difficulties suffered by people with autism. Sarah's study has features much closer to challenges faced by people with autism in real life. It, therefore, has the potential to tell us precisely what aspects of social functioning are difficult for them."

Related Information

• Detecting Autism in Children with an Eye Test
• High-Tech Tools to Study Autism Eye Contact
• Relatives of Individuals with Autism Tend to Display Abnormal Eye Movements
• Visual Pattern Preferences May be Sign of Autism in Children

Attribution/Source(s):
This peer reviewed publication was selected for publishing by the editors of Disabled World (DW) due to its significant relevance to the disability community. Originally authored by Nottingham University, and published on 2009/04/03 (Edit Update: 2022/08/22), the content may have been edited for style, clarity, or brevity. For further details or clarifications, Nottingham University can be contacted at nottingham.ac.uk. NOTE: Disabled World does not provide any warranties or endorsements related to this article.