Impaired sadness recognition is linked to social interaction deficit in autism

Can autistic individuals use motion cues to identify simple emotions from 2D abstract animations? We compared emotion recognition ability using a novel test involving computerised animations, and a more conventional emotion recognition test using facial expressions. Adults with autism and normal controls, matched for age and verbal IQ, participated in two experiments. First, participants viewed a series of short (5 s) animations. These featured an ‘emotional’ triangle, interacting with a circle. They were designed to evoke an attribution of emotion to the triangle, which was rated both in terms of anger, happiness, sadness or fear from its pattern of movement, and how animate (“living”) it appeared to be. Second, emotion recognition was tested from standardised photographs of facial expressions. In both experiments, adults with autism were significantly impaired relative to comparisons in their perception of sadness. This is the first demonstration that, in autism, individuals can have difficulties both in the interpretation of facial expressions and in the recognition of equivalent emotions based on the movement of abstract stimuli. Poor performance in the animations task was significantly correlated with the degree of impairment in reciprocal social interaction, assessed by the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. Our findings point to a deficit in emotion recognition in autism, extending beyond the recognition of facial expressions, which is associated with a functional impairment in social interaction skills. Our results are discussed in the context of the results of neuroimaging studies that have used animated stimuli and images of faces.