The Eyes Tell All

Did you know that autistic children use the eyes of others to understand their feelings? Yes, it is true that previous researchers hypothesized that autistic people do not use the parts of a person’s face to understand a person’s mental state, causing the problem in their social life. I felt that this might not be true because every person must have a way to communicate and understand the feelings of others. New studies at the University of Nottingham found that autistic children can interpret mental states when looking at animated facial expressions. I guess I read their minds! Anyway, a research project was lead by Dr. Elisa Back and her co-researchers Professor Peter Mitchell and Dr. Danielle Ropar of the School of Psychology at The University of Nottingham. The study compared two groups of autistic children, one being the ages 10-14 and the other aged 11-15, to two control groups of non-autistic children. The children went through many tests of seeing different parts of the body to interpret different facial expressions. Two experiments were made to know which parts of the face the children use to interpret feelings accurately. The experiments would show either still images of parts of the face or animated and expressive images of them. The second experiment that was done showed that 18 autistic children had the same successful results as other non-autistic children to read feelings from only the eyes of people or even the whole face. I felt happy to know that autistic children really can read faces as well as other children. The researchers from the experiments concluded that the autistic children use the eyes and mouths of people to understand how others feel. They also said that the expressive images of the animated faces gave more accurate answers from the children. Therefore, the previous hypothesis on autistic children’s social behavior was proven wrong.

The photograph on this post was found on http://www.benhammersley.com/weblog/2003/03/24/the_eyes_have_it.html

If you would like to learn more about this research, you can visit:

http://www.brightsurf.com/news/headlines/29641/%E2%80%98The_eyes_have_it%E2%80%99_%E2%80%94_autism_research_yields_surprising_results.html