Testing the relationships between facial emotion recognition, levels of autistic traits, and eye gaze patterns

Individuals with high levels of Autistic traits often experience challenges in interpreting others' emotions, potentially stemming from atypical patterns of visual attention to facial cues. This study investigates whether Autism-like traits in a non-clinical sample are associated with overall emotion recognition accuracy, differential attention to facial areas of interest (eyes, mouth, and other regions), and emotion-specific recognition impairments. Eighty-two participants were presented with videos of actors displaying the six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) at high and low intensities while eye movements were recorded. Autism-like traits were quantified using a composite score derived from well-validated questionnaires. Overall, higher Autism-like traits correlated with weaker emotion recognition performance (r = -.34, p = .002). Attention to the mouth was positively correlated with emotion recognition accuracy (r = .24, p = .03), but not to the eyes. Notably, levels of Autistic traits did not correlate with gaze patterns to either mouth or eye regions, a null finding that differs from established literature on eye avoidance patterns in Autistic populations. Levels of Autistic traits were selectively associated with recognition of negative emotions of anger, disgust, and fear, but not happiness. These findings confirm the relationship between Autistic traits and emotion recognition difficulties in the broader population, as well as the importance of attention to emotionally salient facial features in emotion recognition. However, our hypothesis that eye-gaze patterns would mediate the relationship between autistic traits and emotion recognition difficulties was not supported.