#9 SSB – Autism, Anime, and Facial Emotion Recognition

second place medalSecond Place Tie in Social Sciences and Business

Student: Bridger Standiford
College or University: Penn State Abington
Advisor: Kevin Hsu

image of research poster

ABSTRACT
Individuals on the autism spectrum, and those higher in autistic traits, have been shown to experience greater difficulty with interpreting the facial emotions of others than those considered neurotypical [1]. They have also demonstrated an increased affinity for anime, a style of Japanese animation [2]. We hypothesized that this preference for anime is accompanied by an increased ability to understand facial emotional expressions in anime characters. Thus, the study examined whether individuals higher in autistic traits can better and more quickly recognize emotional expressions in anime faces relative to real human faces. Additionally, the study examined whether those higher in autistic traits outperform those lower in autistic traits at recognizing emotions in anime faces. To test this, we designed an online self-report survey on Qualtrics. The survey included a validated, abbreviated measure of autistic traits, known as the AQ-10 [3]. Participants then completed a facial emotion recognition task, consisting of photos of human faces and images of anime faces showing a variety of facial expressions. Participants were asked to correctly identify the expressions within a time limit. While, in line with our hypothesis, subjects higher in autistic traits performed significantly worse on the human facial recognition section (r (127)= -.18, p= .04), subjects higher in autistic traits continued to perform worse at anime facial recognition, although not significantly so or to the same degree (r (127)= -.07, p= .44). As a result, our hypothesis was only partially supported. In agreement with the hypothesis, individuals who ranked higher in autistic traits performed worse at recognizing human facial expressions. Also, while individuals higher in autistic traits were not significantly better at recognizing the expressions of anime faces, the data still trended in that direction.

Keywords: Psychology, facial emotion recognition, autism, anime

References:
[1]: Keating, C.T., & Cook, J. (2020). Facial expression production and recognition in autism spectrum disorders: A shifting landscape. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of America, 29, 557-571. doi:10.1016/j.chc.2020.02.006

[2]: Kuo, M. H., Orsmond, G. I., Coster, W. J., & Cohn, E. S. (2014). Media use among adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. Autism, 18, 914-923. doi:10.1177/1362361313497832

[3]: Allison, C., Auyeung, B., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2012). Toward brief “red flags” for autism screening: The short autism spectrum quotient and the short quantitative checklist in 1,000 cases and 3,000 controls. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 51, e7. doi:10.1016/j.jaac.2011.11.003

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