Connor Keating

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨 The relationship between speed and curvature differs in autistic and non-autistic tracing movements
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
And just as important, the open code and data: osf.io/j4ncd/overvi...

Thank you Lydia 😃

Really excited to share we’ve been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept grant ✨ This funding helps us take our co-developed autism screening tool from research into healthcare—improving access, equity & efficiency in diagnosis for children & adults. More soon!

www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2026/un...

Huge thank you to Prof. Jennifer Cook and Carmen Kraaijkamp for their help with this project✨ It was a big team effort!

✨Understanding these different routes to interpreting other people's emotions may help us design better, more tailored support to help both autistic and non-autistic people to read others' emotions (if that aligns with someone's personal goals)✨🧵14

Take home ✨Autistic and non-autistic adults did not differ in how consistently or distinctly they experienced emotions, or in how well they understood and differentiated emotion meanings. Instead, they appeared to use different routes to recognise emotions (needs to be confirmed in future work)🧵13

For non-autistic people, having more distinct emotion definitions linked to more distinct emotional experiences which linked to higher emotion recognition

For autistic people, having a more precise understanding of emotion words linked to higher emotion recognition🧵12

But autistic and non-autistic people did seem to differ in *how* - the way in which - they recognise emotions in others 🧵11

Here’s what we found 👇 After controlling for alexithymia, autistic and non-autistic adults did not differ in: • how consistent or distinct their emotional experiences were • how well they understood emotion words • how much emotion meanings overlapped🧵10

Participants completed tasks measuring how consistent (repeatable) and distinct their own emotions were, how well they understood and differentiated the meanings of emotion words, and how accurately they recognised emotions from facial movements 🧵9

In our study, we compared 58 autistic and 59 non-autistic adults, carefully matched on age, sex, and reasoning ability - and accounted for alexithymia 🧵8

This means we don't know whether differences in emotional experience and emotion understanding are linked to autism, alexithymia, or both🧵7

A key issue with past studies, however, is that they have not taken into account alexithymia - which involves difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotions, and is common in autistic people 🧵6

In related literature, research suggests autistic and non-autistic people might differ in the degree to which they distinguish between the meaning, and their experiences of, distinct emotions. These differences could lead to differences in interpreting other people's emotions🧵5

For example, if emotions like anger and sadness feel very similar inside, or are not clearly distinguished in our own conceptualisations, it may be harder to tell these emotions apart when observing other people... (See link for more info: doi.org/10.1038/s415...) 🧵4

Recognising emotions in others isn’t just about reading facial/bodily cues. It may also depend on how clearly we understand and experience our own emotions, and how well we understand emotion concepts (like what “anger” or “frustration” and "irritation" mean)🧵3

Some studies suggest that autistic people sometimes find it difficult to recognise other people’s emotions. However, it is not clear if this is truly the case, and if so, why 🧵2

The Conceptualization, Experience, and Recognition of Emotion in Autism: Differences in the Psychological Mechanisms Involved in Autistic and Non‐Autistic Emotion Recognition Existing literature suggests that differences between autistic and non-autistic people in emotion recognition might be related to differences in how these groups experience emotions themselves. Speci...

Fab news! Our paper "The conceptualisation, experience, and recognition of emotion in autism: Differences in the psychological mechanisms involved in autistic and non-autistic emotion recognition" has now been published in Autism Research⭐ Summary: 🧵1
doi.org/10.1002/aur....

We are currently investigating this idea specifically, so watch this space for updates👀🧵18/18

Autistic and non-autistic people may express emotions in ways that are different but equally meaningful - almost like speaking different languages. So, what has sometimes been interpreted as difficulties for autistic people may reflect a two-way misunderstanding...🧵17

In sum, we found differences in the appearance of facial expressions, how these expressions unfold over time, and how smoothly they are formed. These mismatches may help to explain why autistic people struggle to recognise non-autistic expressions and vice versa...🧵16

Alexithymia was linked to less clearly distinct angry and happy expressions, making them more likely to appear ambiguous... 🧵15

Interestingly, we also found that the autistic participants produced more unique facial expressions – in other words, they showed more individualised or creative ways of expressing emotion... 🧵14

A graph showing differences in activation across 44 facial features between autistic and non-autistic participants for cued happy expressions across time. In the graph, you can see that the autistic participants showed lower activation of many eye, eyebrow, mouth, and cheek features, and higher activation of some (other) mouth features, while holding the peak expression.

We also looked at differences in activation and jerk across time - check out the paper to see what we found 👀 doi.org/10.1002/aur.... 🧵13

For sadness, the autistic participants produced a downturned expression by raising their upper lip more than their non-autistic peers... 🧵12

For happiness, the autistic participants showed a less exaggerated smile that also did not tend to reach the eyes and eyebrows, and... 🧵11

For anger, the autistic participants showed lower activation of the eyebrows, and more jerky mouth movements, suggesting they may rely less on the eyebrows and more on the mouth, than their non-autistic peers... 🧵10

We found that autistic and non-autistic adults produced different facial expressions, even when facial structure and alexithymia were taken into account.. 🧵9

To make sure we were only measuring facial movements, and not differences in facial structure, we mapped all expressions onto the same standard face before analysing the movements. We also controlled for alexithymia in our analyses... 🧵8

So, in this study, we asked autistic and non-autistic adults to produce angry, happy, and sad facial expressions in two ways - in synchrony with some sounds and while speaking - while we tracked their face (with high resolution) through motion capture... 🧵7