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Autistic Traits Do Not Affect Emotional Face Processing in a General Population Sample

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Abstract

It has been suggested that atypical emotional face processing strategies observed in autism may extend in milder form to the general population. We investigated the relationship between autistic traits (AT) and gaze behaviour in a neurotypical adult sample. Novel naturalistic videos featuring happy, fearful and neutral faces were first validated in a sample of 22 participants. A separate sample of participants (N = 67) then viewed the three videos in counterbalanced order. Eye-tracking data showed that participants looked longer at emotional than neutral faces, and exploration of facial features varied with emotional condition. AT did not influence viewing patterns, time to first fixation or number of early fixations. We conclude that AT in the general population do not affect visual processing of emotional faces.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

    Ciara M. Greene, Esther Suess & Yazeed Kelly

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  1. Ciara M. Greene
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  2. Esther Suess
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  3. Yazeed Kelly
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Contributions

CG and ES developed the study concept and design. CG collected the data for Experiment 1 and ES collected the data for Experiment 2. All authors contributed to the data analysis. CG wrote the manuscript, with assistance from YK and based in part on an undergraduate thesis written by ES.

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Correspondence to Ciara M. Greene.

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Greene, C.M., Suess, E. & Kelly, Y. Autistic Traits Do Not Affect Emotional Face Processing in a General Population Sample. J Autism Dev Disord 50, 2673–2684 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04375-w

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