Speeded reasoning moderates the inverse relationship between autistic traits and emotion recognition

Autistic people typically have difficulty recognizing other people's emotions and to process nonverbal cues in an automatic, intuitive fashion. This usually also applies to people who-regardless of an official diagnosis of autism-achieve high values in autism questionnaires. However, some autistic people do not seem to have any problems with emotion recognition. One explanation may be that these individuals are able to compensate for their lack of intuitive or automatic processing through a quick conscious and deliberate analysis of the emotional cues in faces, voices, and body movements. On these grounds, we assumed that the higher autistic people's ability to reason quickly (i.e. to make quick logical inferences), the fewer problems they should have with determining other people's emotions. In our study, we asked workers on the crowdsourcing marketplace MTurk to complete a questionnaire about their autistic traits, to perform emotion recognition tests, and to complete a test of the ability to reason under time constraints. In our sample of 217 people, we found the expected pattern. Overall, those who had higher values in the autism questionnaire scored lower in the emotion recognition tests. However, when reasoning ability was taken into account, a more nuanced picture emerged: participants with high values both on the autism questionnaire and on the reasoning test recognized emotions as well as individuals with low autistic traits. Our results suggest that fast analytic information processing may help autistic people to compensate problems in recognizing others' emotions.