New evidence suggests that people with autism understand well social cues conveyed by human voices
"The face is the key to the soul," claims an old proverb. But people with autism are often unable to decide when another person's face is expressing an emotion such as joy or sadness. Many researchers saw this difficulty as evidence that autism is a condition involving severe impairments in processing social information. However, a person's voice is also capable of providing emotional information. Some new research suggests that when people with autism listen to voices, they are able to recognize emotions and other human traits just as much, and sometimes even better, than people with a normal neurological profile.
The studies were small in scope and focused exclusively on adults with high-functioning autism. These subjects do not necessarily represent the entire population of people with autism, says Andrew Whitehouse, head of the autism research department at the Telethon Children's Institute in Australia. And it is impossible to translate success in a laboratory task into success in social interactions in the real world, she adds Helen Tager-Flossberg, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston University. However, the studies suggest that at least for some subgroups of people with autism, in certain situations, it is possible to limit the impairments in recognizing emotions mainly to vision. "This is very good news from a therapeutic point of view," he says Kevin Pelfrey, director of the Institute for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders at George Washington University. "It is much easier to help a person who is unable to read emotions in people's faces, than to treat a fundamental inability to understand emotions comprehensively."
Three studies on autism and emotions
Daniel Jewitt From the Nathan Klein Institute for Psychiatric Research in New York State and his colleagues presented subjects with photographs of faces expressing joy, sadness, fear or anger. The nineteen subjects, all with autism, had difficulty recognizing these emotions. But when the researchers played the same subjects recordings of voices expressing similar emotions, they recognized them no less well than did non-autistic subjects in a control group. the results were published in August 2016 In the Journal of Psychiatric Research.
neuroscientist Tammy bought it from Osaka University in Japan and her colleagues asked their subjects to classify real singing voices and those produced by a computer and to rate their degree of humanity. In the classification and ranking of real voices, the performance of subjects with autism differed from those of the control group members. However, the 14 subjects with autism gave the artificial voices the same low score in terms of humanity and emotional quality that the members of the control group gave them. the results were published in August 2016 In the journal Cognitionn.
Members of a research team led by Yi-Fan Lin of Tokyo Metropolitan University measured the time it took people to distinguish whether a particular sound was produced by a human hand. (The recorded segments included the playing of a certain note on the violin and a person pronouncing the vowel "e".) Not only did the 12 subjects with autism perform the task faster than their peers in the control group, they also performed it better: they responded without difficulty to human voices Even when these were missing important acoustic components. the results were published in May 2016 In an online issue of the journal Scientific Reportss.
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My psychiatrist told a social worker that I understand social situations better than them. I was diagnosed with Asperger's with accompanying social anxiety, I really understand people, much better than them, the psychiatrist was right, I may not know how to lie, but I know exactly when other people are lying and when they are telling the truth. I know exactly how people lie all the time and how people are unable to lie, few, especially autistic people.
You can't fool me, I'm not as naive as people mistakenly think, because of this diagnosis.
You can fool the social worker, you can fool the psychiatrist and do it my brothers, you can't fool me it's impossible, recalculate the route, autistic people know very well where they are.