Review: Posed vs. Genuine Facial Emotion Recognition and Expression in Autism and Implications for Intervention

Abstract

Different styles of social interaction are one of the core characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Social differences among individuals with ASD often include difficulty in discerning the emotions of neurotypical people based on their facial expressions. This review first covers the rich body of literature studying differences in facial emotion recognition (FER) in those with ASD, including behavioral studies and neurological findings. In particular, we highlight subtle emotion recognition and various factors related to inconsistent findings in behavioral studies of FER in ASD. Then, we discuss the dual problem of FER – namely facial emotion expression (FEE) or the production of facial expressions of emotion. Despite being less studied, social interaction involves both the ability to recognize emotions and to produce appropriate facial expressions. How others perceive facial expressions of emotion in those with ASD has remained an under-researched area. Finally, we propose a method for teaching FER [FER teaching hierarchy (FERTH)] based on recent research investigating FER in ASD, considering the use of posed vs. genuine emotions and static vs. dynamic stimuli. We also propose two possible teaching approaches: (1) a standard method of teaching progressively from simple drawings and cartoon characters to more complex audio-visual video clips of genuine human expressions of emotion with context clues or (2) teaching in a field of images that includes posed and genuine emotions to improve generalizability before progressing to more complex audio-visual stimuli. Lastly, we advocate for autism interventionists to use FER stimuli developed primarily for research purposes to facilitate the incorporation of well-controlled stimuli to teach FER and bridge the gap between intervention and research in this area.

Augmented Reality for Autistic Children to Enhance Their Understanding of Facial Expressions

“…The proposed system was designed with AR, and the system was designed after consulting specialists in the field of childcare. We received a lot of notes and instructions to make the AR system attractive and easy to deal with, and this is consistent with [42], which recommends some ways to teach children facial expressions through images and pictures.…”

“…It was noted that the children with autism had neutral facial expressions, while children in the other group interacted, and this appeared from their facial expressions. In [42], which is a recent study, researchers reviewed several studies that studied the relationship of autism with the ability to understand and perceive facial expressions, which indicates the existence of difficulties in this category. It also reviewed some proposals for intervention to teach and improve their ability to understand these expressions, which consisted of images and pictures, and this is what was done in our study, which proved its effectiveness.…”

Discriminative Few Shot Learning of Facial Dynamics in Interview Videos for Autism Trait Classification

“…Seven selected scenes (5,6,7,11,12,13,14) are experimented with ten-fold cross-validation, respectively. To facilitate visual inspection, we have shown the fusion results in both Table V and Fig.…”

“…Studies on facial expression/emotion recognition and ASD have mainly used static images with posed expressions in the literature (e.g., [3] and [4]). Despite the extension to dynamic video with posed facial expression [5], there is still no automated and comprehensive analysis of facial expression in autism, especially in natural settings [6].…”

Effects of an intensive slow cortical potentials neurofeedback training in female and male adolescents with autism spectrum disorder

“…Regarding emotional processing, the most common finding is an impairment in facial emotion recognition in individuals with ASD [ 31 , 32 ]. Studies repeatedly showed that patients with ASD exhibit slower reaction times [ 33 ] as well as more incorrect classifications of emotion assignments than typically developing subjects [ 34 – 36 ]. Moreover, the gaze at the eyes of others is associated with a higher rate of correct answers in emotion recognition and lower symptom severity [ 37 ].…”