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Emotion recognition in autism: coordinating faces and voices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

R. P. Hobson ,
J. Ouston  and
A. Lee
R. P. Hobson*
Affiliation:
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, London
J. Ouston
Affiliation:
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, London
A. Lee
Affiliation:
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, London
*
1 Address for correspondence: Dr R. Peter Hobson, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, London, SE5 8AF.
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Synopsis

Autistic and non-autistic mentally retarded adolescents and young adults were individually matched for age and verbal ability and were given tasks in which they chose photographs of faces for emotionally expressive voices, and photographs of non-emotional things or events to accompany recorded sounds. The results were that relative to control subjects, autistic individuals performed less well on the emotion tasks than on the non-emotion tasks. The findings suggest that autistic individuals have a disability in recognizing bodily expressions of emotion, and that there is a degree of task-specificity to this impairment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , November 1988 , pp. 911 - 923
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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