For many with autism, reading facial expressions is a struggle
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Jeff Hudale, who is autistic, demonstrates a facial recognition test last week at the University of Pittsburgh in which he is shown a series of faces expressing different emotions and then asked to decide which emotion he is seeing. -
Dr. Mark Strauss is a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who studies the ability of people with autism to read faces.
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Jeff Hudale sat in a darkened room at a University of Pittsburgh laboratory as one face after another appeared on a computer screen in front of him.
"Disgusted," he said. "Angry." Then, a long pause. "Neutral."
For someone with autism, Mr. Hudale was doing a pretty good job of identifying the emotional expressions on the photos, said Mark Strauss, an autism researcher at Pitt.
"On the obvious expressions, he did pretty well," Dr. Strauss said. "Where he was falling apart was when they were more subtle."
In particular, Mr. Hudale, 38, of Penn Hills, had trouble with faces that showed slight anger or disgust, and often called them neutral. "If you look at someone like Jeff who's pretty good at this, but he's not quite good enough, then you have to ask, what level of skill do you need so that people aren't thinking you're odd on this ability?"
Autism is a developmental disorder that is often marked by repetitive behaviors, language delays and obsessive interests.
But the key deficit, many experts feel, is an inability to engage in normal social interactions. People with autism often have a hard time figuring out what others are thinking and feeling, and they struggle with reading facial expressions.
To Dr. Strauss, subtlety is the key to understanding what is going on when most of us interpret other people's expressions, and is the critical stumbling block for people with autism.
It's also a shortcoming that Mr. Hudale, who has been diagnosed with a high-functioning form of autism known as Asperger syndrome, recognizes himself.
If people are grinning broadly or are shocked, he can recognize that pretty easily, he said in an interview, but "when I am in a regular conversation, even if someone might seem like they're in a bad mood, they can put on that expression where they try to hide it and they do such a good job of hiding it I wouldn't even notice it."
Reading expressions, he said, "can be kind of tricky, especially if they give you that poker face."
Previous research on autism and emotional expressions often used photographs and let people with autism gaze at the pictures until they could make a guess at the expression, Dr. Strauss said.
But in real life, emotions on the face come and go in an instant.
First Published September 27, 2010 12:00 am
