Coming face to face with autism

PA 93/09 Volunteers are needed to help increase our understanding of the social and communication difficulties experienced by people with autism. In the first study of its kind researchers will use video clips of spontaneously produced facial expressions in a real life social context to explore emotion recognition in autism. This research, carried out at The University of Nottingham, will go beyond the more artificial emotion recognition tasks that have previously been used. The eye movements of volunteers will also be tracked to find out which areas of the face were looked at while volunteers make spontaneous judgements. The study is being conducted by PhD student Sarah Cassidy who is a member of the Autism Research Team based in the School of Psychology. Her work has been funded through a PhD studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council. Her work will investigate if people with autism look at faces, particularly in the eye region, differently.