The Animal in Me: Enhancing Emotion Recognition in Adolescents with Autism Using Animal Filters

Liam Cross, Myles Farha, Gray Atherton*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

People with autism are often characterized as having difficulties with theory of mind abilities such as emotion recognition. However, rather than being a pervasive deficit of ‘mindblindness,’ a number of studies suggests these difficulties vary by context, and when people with autism mindread non-human agents, such as animals or cartoons, these abilities improve. To replicate this effect, 15 adolescents with both autism and intellectual disability participated in a test of facial emotion recognition, with both human and animal faces. Participants performed significantly better on the animal version of the assessment compared to the human version, and human rather than animal scores were the strongest predictor of symptom severity. These results were shown to be primarily driven by improvement in recognition of the emotions happiness and anger in animal rather than human faces. Implications with regards to social motivation and theory of mind interventions are discussed.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)4482-4487
Number of pages6
JournalJournal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Volume49
Issue number11
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2019

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Developmental and Educational Psychology

Keywords

  • Anthropomorphism
  • Autism
  • Emotion recognition
  • Facial processing
  • Intellectual disability
  • Theory of mind

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The Animal in Me: Enhancing Emotion Recognition in Adolescents with Autism Using Animal Filters'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this