Brief Report: Reduced Prioritization of Facial Threat in Adults with Autism

Abstract

Typically-developing (TD) adults detect angry faces more efficiently within a crowd than non-threatening faces. Prior studies of this social threat superiority effect (TSE) in ASD using tasks consisting of schematic faces and homogeneous crowds have produced mixed results. Here, we employ a more ecologically-valid test of the social TSE and find evidence of a reduced social TSE in adults with ASD (n = 21) relative to TD controls (n = 28). Unlike TD participants, the ASD group failed to show the normative advantage for detecting angry faces faster than happy faces, either within crowds of neutral or emotional faces. These findings parallel prior work indicating a reduced sensitivity in ASD to facial cues of untrustworthiness, and may reflect a vulnerability for evaluating social harm.

Emotion recognition across visual and auditory modalities in autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Despite the seemingly reduced task demands, findings have also been inconsistent. Nonverbal discrimination tasks, requiring participants to indicate whether the stimuli within a pair display the same or different emotions, have reported group differences with human faces (e.g., Greimel et al, 2014;Sasson, Shasteen, & Pinkham, 2016b;Vannetzel, Chaby, Cautru, Cohen, & Plaza, 2011), but not with speech prosody (e.g., Lindström et al, 2018). Nonverbal matching tasks, where participants are shown an emotional stimulus and then choose a stimulus from a set that displays the same expression, have found group differences (e.g., Philip et al, 2010;Tanaka et al, 2012).…”