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Updated: Jul 19, 2025

Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome
Published on: July 31, 2016
Diminished emotion recognition with reduced face gaze in complex situation in individuals with broad autism phenotype
1Department of Psychology, Chung-Ang University, 84, Heukseok-ro, Dongjak-gu, Seoul 06974, Republic of Korea.
Background/Objective:
Individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP) showed a diminished ability to recognize emotion. This study aims to examine whether their decline in emotion recognition ability could be more clearly identified as task complexity increased and whether their decline could be influenced by their eye-gaze patterns.
Method:
41 individuals with BAP and 40 healthy controls performed two types of emotion recognition tasks. After confirming conditions wherein the BAP group did not perform well compared to the control group, we compared gaze proportion on faces and context between groups when performing the conditions.
Results:
The more difficult the task, the clearer the significant relationships between the level of autistic traits and emotion recognition ability. The BAP group showed lower accuracy compared to the control group when a face with mild emotional intensity was presented with context. In terms of gaze proportion, the BAP group looked less at faces when recognizing emotions compared to the control group.
Conclusion:
These findings indicate that diminished emotion recognition ability in individuals with BAP may be influenced by face gaze.
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