Autistic traits, alexithymia, and emotion recognition of human and anime faces

Individuals on the autism spectrum or with elevated autistic traits have shown difficulty in recognizing people's facial emotions. They also tend to gravitate toward anime, a highly visual medium featuring animated characters whose facial emotions may be easier to distinguish. Because autistic traits overlap with alexithymia, or difficulty in identifying and describing feelings, alexithymia might explain the association between elevated autistic traits and difficulty with facial emotion recognition. The present study used a computerized task to first examine whether elevated autistic traits in a community sample of 247 adults were associated with less accurate emotion recognition of human but not anime faces. Results showed that individuals higher in autistic traits performed significantly worse on the human facial emotion recognition task, but no better or worse on the anime version. After controlling for alexithymia and other potentially confounding variables, autistic traits were no longer associated with performance on the facial emotion recognition tasks. However, alexithymia remained a significant predictor and fully mediated the relationship between autistic traits and emotion recognition of both human and anime faces. Findings suggest that interventions designed to help individuals on the autism spectrum with facial emotion recognition might benefit from targeting alexithymia and employing anime characters.