Instructions to mimic improve facial emotion recognition in people with sub-clinical autism traits

ABSTRACT

People tend to mimic the facial expression of others. It has been suggested that this helps provide social glue between affiliated people but it could also aid recognition of emotions through embodied cognition. The degree of facial mimicry, however, varies between individuals and is limited in people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). The present study sought to investigate the effect of promoting facial mimicry during a facial-emotion-recognition test. In two experiments, participants without an ASC diagnosis had their autism quotient (AQ) measured. Following a baseline test, they did an emotion-recognition test again but half of the participants were asked to mimic the target face they saw prior to making their responses. Mimicry improved emotion recognition, and further analysis revealed that the largest improvement was for participants who had higher scores on the autism traits. In fact, recognition performance was best overall for people who had high AQ scores but also received the instruction to mimic. Implications for people with ASC are explored.

KEYWORDS:

• Autism spectrum
• Embodied cognition
• Emotional expression recognition
• Facial feedback
• Facial mimicry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Michael B. Lewis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5735-5318

Notes

1. The term autism spectrum condition (ASC) is used here rather than the term autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The Autism Research Centre (n.d.) describes the term ASD as being “stigmatizing and pejorative”. For some people, autism can be a disorder and a disability but for others it is something that just makes them different. The term “condition” recognizes both these differences and the possibility that it can be disabling for some people.

2. EMG recording was not employed here because it was considered that placing electrodes on the participants’ faces could prime facial muscular action, and this would interfere with the main manipulation of the study. Similarly, a fully counter-balanced design could not be used as giving people instructions to mimic prior to asking them to do the task naturally would have carry-over effects between the two conditions: That is, participants might (and probably would) continue to mimic in the second condition.

3. In order to do a power analysis to calculate the sample size, it is necessary to have a predicted effect size. As this experiment had not been previously carried out an analogous experiment was identified. For this, the observed correlation observed between the AQ score and another emotion recognition test (the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test) was used. This comparison was chosen because the aspect of the results on which conclusions would be drawn is the correlation between the performance change measure and the AQ score. Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, and Plumb (2001) reported a correlation of .55, which suggested a sample size of 23 for each condition in the current study.