Scientists from Great Britain found that people with autism spectrum disorder express emotions with facial expressions differently than people without autism. According to the authors of the study, they can thus speak a different mimic language, which can make mutual understanding difficult. Authors from the University of Birmingham compared expressions of anger, joy and sadness in autistic and non-autistic adults.
They found, for example, that when expressing anger, people with autism moved their mouths more and their eyebrows less than others. When they were happy, their smiles were less expressive – they engaged their eyes less and did not raise their cheeks, so the smile did not reach the upper half of the face. When they were sad, on the other hand, they raised their upper lip more and created a more prominent hanging mouth. The authors of the study, published in the professional journal Autism Research, said that these differences may explain why people with autism have difficulty recognizing the emotions of others – and why it is difficult for non-autistic people to read the emotions of autistic people.
“Our findings suggest that autistic and non-autistic people differ not only in the appearance of facial expressions, but also in how fluently these expressions are produced,” said study author Dr Connor Keating, now at the University of Oxford. “What are sometimes thought to be difficulties in autistic people may actually reflect a mutual problem in understanding the expressions of others,” added the main author of the paper, Professor Jennifer Cook.
