Parenting an autistic child is not associated with the amount of facial emotion information needed to perceive happiness or sadness from faces

Abstract

One common feature of autism is “flat affect:” Many autistic people do not facially express emotion as intensely as non-autistic people. Although it can be difficult for a casual acquaintance or stranger to infer what someone with flat affect is feeling, some mothers of autistic children report learning to identify their children’s emotions from limited facial emotion information. We investigated whether this parenting experience is associated with the point at which mothers perceive happiness and sadness on faces of individuals other than their children. We used two tasks where faces of strangers morphed from a neutral expression to peak happiness and peak sadness; we measured the point at which mothers first perceived happiness and sadness in these morphs. In samples that were overwhelmingly North American, White, and highly educated, mothers of autistic children (n = 24), mothers of non-autistic children (n = 24) and age-matched non-mothers (n = 24) did not differ in the point at which they perceived happiness and sadness. The heightened sensitivity some mothers of autistic children report in perceiving emotion on their children’s faces may not play a role in how they perceive emotion on other people’s faces, at least in the case of happiness and sadness. Interestingly, however, the three groups of middle-aged women perceived happiness (but not sadness) at an earlier point than a group of young adult women attending a U.S. university (n = 151), a finding that is consistent with socio-emotional selectivity theory.