Intergroup Bias in Smile Discrimination in Autism

Ruihan Wu, Antonia Hamilton, Sarah White


Abstract
Genuine and posed smiles are important social cues (Song, Over, & Carpenter, 2016). Autistic individuals struggle to reliably differentiate between them (Blampied, Johnston, Miles, & Liberty, 2010; Boraston, Corden, Miles, Skuse, & Blakemore, 2008), which may contribute to their difficulties in understanding others’ mental states. An intergroup bias has been found in non-autistic adults in identifying genuine from posed smiles (Young, 2017). This is the first study designed to investigate if autistic individuals would show a different pattern when differentiating smiles for in-groups and out-groups. Fifty-nine autistic adults were compared with forty non-autistic adults, matched on sex, age and nonverbal IQ. Roughly, half of each group were further randomly separated into two groups with a minimal group paradigm (adapted from Howard & Rothbart, 1980). There was no real difference between the groups, participants were primed to believe they were more similar to their in-groups. The ability to distinguish smiles was assessed on a 7-point Likert scale. We found both autism and non-autism groups rated genuine smiles more genuine than posed smiles and in-groups more genuine than out-groups. Even though both groups identified themselves more as in-group than out-group members, autistic individuals were less likely to than non-autistic individuals. However, autistic participants generally rated smiles as less genuine than non-autistic counterparts. These results indicate that autistic adults are capable of identifying genuine smiles from posed smiles, unlike previous findings; but they may be less convinced of the genuineness of others, which may affect their social communication thereafter. Importantly, autistic adults were equally influenced by social intergroup biases which has the potential to be used in interventions to alleviate their social difficulties in daily lives.
Anthology ID:
2022.smila-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Smiling and Laughter across Contexts and the Life-span within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Chiara Mazzocconi, Kevin El Haddad, Catherine Pelachaud, Gary McKeown
Venue:
SmiLa
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
27
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.smila-1.7
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruihan Wu, Antonia Hamilton, and Sarah White. 2022. Intergroup Bias in Smile Discrimination in Autism. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Smiling and Laughter across Contexts and the Life-span within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, page 27, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Intergroup Bias in Smile Discrimination in Autism (Wu et al., SmiLa 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.smila-1.7.pdf