Background: There is a general belief in the scientific community that autistic people have emotion recognition (ER) difficulties. Despite this, the research is inconclusive, with roughly half of the studies showing that autistic people have similar ER ability to non-autistic people. The alexithymia hypothesis posits that ER differences found in some autistic individuals might be due to concurrent alexithymia, with some incipient research backing this claim. One limitation of past literature is the focus on facial expressions, with ER from body language remaining understudied, especially in relation to autism and alexithymia. Methods: Adults ( N = 364) completed a face and body ER task containing video expressions of all basic emotions, during which we measured their accuracy, confidence, and intensity ratings. Participants also completed Alexithymia (PAQ) and autism traits (AQ-10) questionnaires. After data cleaning, we split participants into an autistic group ( n = 71) and non-autistic group ( n = 279). We used alexithymia scores to further split the two autism groups into high and low alexithymia categories. We investigated the effects of autism and alexithymia on body and face ER accuracy (unbiased hit rates), confidence ratings, and intensity ratings. Results: Autistic individuals had slightly lower accuracy and confidence than non-autistic individuals. When alexithymia was modeled with autism, autistic people were no different than non-autistic people on accuracy and confidence. Alexithymia was a better predictor of confidence than autism and interacted with modality. Bodies were harder to recognize than faces, but we found no interaction between modality and autism or alexithymia. Our results did not find differences in intensity ratings. Conclusion: Alexithymia may account for differences in ER accuracy and confidence between autistic and non-autistic people. Our findings support the alexithymia hypothesis of autism. This is the first study comparing facial and bodily ER in autistic and non-autistic people and in low- and high-alexithymia-score individuals.
Zarie et al. (Tue,) studied this question.