Complex Emotion Processing in Autistic Adults

"Accurate perceptions of emotions are essential for successful social interactions. Emotions are divided into different categories, such as basic emotions ( anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and complex emotions, which arise from the interaction of basic emotions, thoughts, social, and cultural influences. Autistic adults have difficulty identifying basic emotions in some contexts. In laboratory research, identification of emotions from facial expressions can be less accurate in Autistic adults than in neurotypical adults."

"However, interesting new data suggest that more life-like and real-world emotion recognition abilities of Autistic adults might be better than lab tests indicate. Contextual information, such as body posture and environmental cues, might improve emotion identification in Autistic adults. Indeed, adults diagnosed with ASD might rely more heavily on bodily or contextual cues for emotion identification than neurotypical adults. To test these ideas, Kline and Blumberg (2025) compared emotion identification in young Autistic adults with young adults without a neurologic, developmental, or psychiatric disorder."

"The research participants saw emotion expressions in three ways. They saw (1) faces of emotional expressions, (2) faces paired with a full body expression of the emotion, and (3) the face and body expression in a context that provided more clues about the emotion. For example, participants would see a face with a happy expression, a full-body picture of the face with a happy expression, and a thumbs-up gesture with a blank background."

Accurate perceptions of emotions are essential for successful social interactions. Emotions include basic categories (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise) and complex emotions arising from interactions among emotions, thoughts, and cultural influences. Autistic adults can have difficulty identifying basic emotions in some contexts and may be less accurate than neurotypical adults when identifying emotions from facial expressions in laboratory settings. More life-like and real-world emotion recognition abilities can be better than lab tests indicate. Contextual cues such as body posture and environment improve emotion identification. Autistic adults may rely more on bodily and contextual cues and may show heightened empathy for negative emotions.

Read at Psychology Today