Strategies utilized by people with autism and neuro-typical individuals to determine emotion in faces

Four years ago, I began helping out at a school for children with autism: At the time, I saw this as an opportunity to give back to my community, with no idea that it would one day end up being the topic of my scientific research. I spent my time acting as both a volunteer and social mentor during summer programs, weekend trips, special events, and school days. A year later, my involvement with the autism community evolved as I began to recruit and organize students from my own high school to participate in volunteering and fundraising events for autism. By the third year, my junior year, I helped implement a program in my high school where teenagers with autism were brought into our building once every few weeks to have lunch with their neuro-typical peers . . . The original intent of such a program was to expose the kids with autism to appropriate social interaction, something many of them struggled with. The program turned out to have numerous other benefits; for one, it opened the eyes of my own peers to the hardships that people with disabilities face. Additionally, it was this program that first got me thinking that autism might be the perfect fit for the topic of my research. Observing the interactions between the teenagers with autism and their neuro-typical peers, I quickly noticed their seemingly deficient ability to gauge the emotions of the people to whom they were talking. As one would imagine, this makes maintaining a conversation substantially more difficult. These observations all happened around the time during which I was focused on developing a research project, so I decided I’d look into the current literature to determine whether what I’d been witnessing was a legitimate, documented problem for children with autism. And I found that, in many cases, it was.

• Medicine