Reduced stereotypicality and spared use of facial expression predictions for social evaluation in autism

Abstract

Autism; Emotion; Facial expressions

Autisme; Emocions; Expressions facials

Background/objective: Autism has been investigated through traditional emotion recognition paradigms, merely investigating accuracy, thereby constraining how potential differences across autistic and control individuals may be observed, identified, and described. Moreover, the use of emotional facial expression information for social functioning in autism is of relevance to provide a deeper understanding of the condition.

Method: Adult autistic individuals (n = 34) and adult control individuals (n = 34) were assessed with a social perception behavioral paradigm exploring facial expression predictions and their impact on social evaluation.

Results: Autistic individuals held less stereotypical predictions than controls. Importantly, despite such differences in predictions, the use of such predictions for social evaluation did not differ significantly between groups, as autistic individuals relied on their predictions to evaluate others to the same extent as controls.

Conclusions: These results help to understand how autistic individuals perceive social stimuli and evaluate others, revealing a deviation from stereotypicality beyond which social evaluation strategies may be intact.

LC was funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (PSI2017-88416-R and PID2020-119677RB-I00), the Government of Catalonia (2017 SGR 1612 and SGR 2021 01010) and ICREA Acadèmia. CFW was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FA 876/3-1 and FA 876/5-1).