Autistic Traits Do Not Affect Emotional Face Processing in a General Population Sample
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Updated: Dec 30, 2025

Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome
Published on: July 31, 2016
Ciara M Greene1, Esther Suess2, Yazeed Kelly2
1School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. ciara.greene@ucd.ie.
Abstract:
It has been suggested that atypical emotional face processing strategies observed in autism may extend in milder form to the general population. We investigated the relationship between autistic traits (AT) and gaze behaviour in a neurotypical adult sample. Novel naturalistic videos featuring happy, fearful and neutral faces were first validated in a sample of 22 participants. A separate sample of participants (N = 67) then viewed the three videos in counterbalanced order. Eye-tracking data showed that participants looked longer at emotional than neutral faces, and exploration of facial features varied with emotional condition. AT did not influence viewing patterns, time to first fixation or number of early fixations. We conclude that AT in the general population do not affect visual processing of emotional faces.
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