Social and Emotion Experiences in Adult ASD

Shared conceptions of emotions are fundamental to social communication and to establishing and maintaining relationships. Core features of Autism are difficulties with social communications and social-emotional reciprocity. This project will determine how young adults with and without Autism have shared and/or different concepts about basic and complex emotions. There are reliable differences in how adults with and without Autism rate facial emotions, suggesting a difficulty in identifying visual markers of different emotions and mapping them to verbal labels. Several studies highlight that these deficits are often tied to co-occurring alexithymia (difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotions) rather than autism traits alone. Nearly all of this work relies on processing visual cues and sometimes of contextual visual information. Little to no research has explored verbal concepts of basic and complex emotions in adult Autism. This project aims to fill that gap in knowledge.