Autistic people's ability to accurately identify facial expressions is affected by the speed at which the expression is produced and its intensity, according to new research at the University of Birmingham.
Study finds autistic people find it harder to identify anger in facial expressions ANI | Updated: Jun 02, 2021 20:17 IST
Birmingham [UK], June 2 (ANI): Autistic people s ability to accurately identify facial expressions is affected by the speed at which the expression is produced and its intensity, according to new research at the University of Birmingham.
In particular, autistic people tend to be less able to accurately identify anger from facial expressions produced at a normal real world speed. The researchers also found that for people with a related disorder, alexithymia, all expressions appeared more intensely emotional.
The question of how people with autism recognise and relate to emotional expression has been debated by scientists for more than three decades and it s only in the past 10 years that the relationship between autism and alexithymia has been explored.
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Autistic people s ability to accurately identify facial expressions is affected by the speed at which the expression is produced and its intensity, according to new research at the University of Birmingham.
In particular, autistic people tend to be less able to accurately identify anger from facial expressions produced at a normal real world speed. The researchers also found that for people with a related disorder, alexithymia, all expressions appeared more intensely emotional.
The question of how people with autism recognise and relate to emotional expression has been debated by scientists for more than three decades and it s only in the past 10 years that the relationship between autism and alexithymia has been explored.
We identified that autistic people had a specific difficulty recognizing anger, which we are starting to think may relate to differences in the way autistic and non-autistic people produce these expressions, said Connor Keating, a researcher in the University of Birmingham s School of Psychology and Centre for Human Brain Health. If this is true, it may not be accurate to talk about autistic people as having an impairment or deficit in recognizing emotion it s more that autistic and non-autistic faces may be speaking a different language when it comes to conveying emotion.
The researchers also discovered that people with a related condition, alexithymia, tend to interpret all types of expressions as more intensely emotional than they actually are.
Representative image (Pic: Express)
In order to accurately identify patients with a mix of psychotic and depressive symptoms, researchers from the University of Birmingham recently developed a way of using machine learning to do so.
The findings of the research were published in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin .
Patients with depression or psychosis rarely experience symptoms of purely one or the other illness. Historically, this has meant that mental health clinicians give a diagnosis of a primary illness, but with secondary symptoms. Making an accurate diagnosis is a big challenge for clinicians and diagnoses often do not accurately reflect the complexity of individual experience or indeed neurobiology.