Factors underlying individual differences in facial expression recognition ability in the broader autism phenotype

Autistic people often have difficulty reading facial expressions of emotion. This difficulty extends into the broader autism phenotype, i.e., the distribution of autistic-like personality traits in the general population. There is wide variation in individual levels of difficulty. In four non-clinical samples, we investigated the factors underlying this variation and tested a hypothesis that difficulty is explained by a co-occurring personality trait, alexithymia. Results indicate that expression-reading difficulty in the broader autism phenotype reflects multiple mood, personality, and perceptual factors and is more robustly tied to variation in autistic-like traits, specifically autistic-like communication, than to co-occurring alexithymia.