Intact Neural and Behavioral Processing of Vocal Emotional Expressions in Men with Autism

Background/Objectives. Human voices convey critical socio-affective information, including emotional states. Although autistic individuals are often reported to show difficulties in processing vocal emotional cues, behavioral findings remain inconsistent. This study aimed to assess neural and behavioral sensitivity to vocal emotion expressions in autistic adults using a sensitive, individual-level EEG approach. Methods. We compared autistic adult men (N = 25) with a non-autistic control group (N = 25), matched for age, sex, and IQ. Neural responses were measured using an auditory frequency-tagging EEG paradigm, in which streams of neutral vocal utterances were presented at 4 Hz, interspersed with emotional utterances (fear, anger, sadness, happiness) every third stimulus, yielding an oddball frequency of 1.333 Hz. Participants also completed a multimodal behavioral emotion recognition task. Results. No significant group differences were observed in either behavioral performance or EEG responses. Both groups showed greater difficulty in auditory emotion recognition compared to visual and audiovisual modalities. Robust oddball EEG responses were found in both groups, indicating automatic neural discrimination of vocal emotions. Higher response amplitudes were observed for fear and anger across groups. Conclusions. These findings indicate intact neural and behavioral processing of vocal emotions in autistic adult men, supporting the notion of developmental delay rather than persistent deficit in socio-affective auditory processing.