Do people with autism look at faces differently?

Apr 1 2009

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, carried out at The University of Nottingham, will go beyond the more artificial emotion recognition tasks that have previously been 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 judgements.

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

Her work will investigate if people with autism look at faces, particularly in the eye region, differently.  If so, does this have any relationship with their ability to recognise emotions in others? What is their understanding of emotions in different social contexts? And as a consequence, how difficult is it for them to socialise 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 who have a diagnoses of autism, autism spectrum disorder or Aspergers 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 home made 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 provide a measure of how challenging each volunteer finds socialising 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 that are much closer to challenges faced by people with autism in real life and therefore has potential to tell us precisely what aspects of social functioning are difficult for them."