Browsing by Person "Stewart, Mary"

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Emotional recognition in autism spectrum conditions from voices and faces
(SAGE, 2013-01-08) Stewart, Mary; McAdam, Clair; Pepp, Sue JE; Cleland, Joanne
The present study reports on a new vocal emotion recognition task and assesses whether people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) perform differently from typically developed individuals on tests of emotional identification from both the face and the voice. The new test of vocal emotion contained trials in which the vocal emotion of the sentence were congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to the semantic content. We also included a condition in which there was no semantic content (an 'mmm' was uttered using an emotional tone). Performance was compared between 11 adults with ASC and 14 typically developed adults. Identification of emotion from sentences in which the vocal emotion and the meaning of sentence were congruent was similar in people with ASC and a typically developed comparison group. However, the comparison group was more accurate at identifying the emotion in the voice from incongruent and neutral trials, and also from trials with no semantic content. The results of the vocal emotion task were correlated with performance on a face emotion recognition task. In decoding emotion from spoken utterances, individuals with ASC relied more on verbal semantics than did typically developed individuals, presumably as a strategy to compensate for their difficulties in using prosodic cues to recognize emotions.
'I too, need to belong': Autistic adults' perspectives on misunderstandings and well-being
(2022-05-10) Camus, Lorna; Macmillan, Kirsty; Rajendran, Gnanathusharan; Stewart, Mary
Research on social interaction in autism has characterised autistic people’s communication as impaired, placing the responsibility of interaction difficulties on autistic people. However, with newer theories of interaction such as the Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012), research is increasingly accounting for the reciprocal nature of interactions. While empirical support for the Double Empathy Problem is growing, there is still little research on its implications for autistic people’s psychological well-being – which is the focus of this study. 25 autistic adults (12 men, 13 women, aged 22-65 years old) participated in focus groups and interviews. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Two themes were identified: 1) Misunderstandings are ubiquitous across the lifespan; 2) Misunderstandings have consequences across all areas of life. Participants agreed that misunderstandings were pervasive, while acceptance within non-autistic society was exceptional. Participants reported that these misunderstandings had a negative impact on all aspects of life, which in turn had serious consequences for their mental health. These results support previous research on double empathy and autistic interactions and provide further insight on social motivation in autism. Future research should explore the mechanisms underlying the relationship between double empathy and mental health, such as camouflaging (Mitchell et al., 2021).