Are emotion recognition abilities related to everyday social functioning in ASD? A meta-analysis

Background: Most developmental theories of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) emphasize a link between the ability to infer others' emotional states with their everyday social functioning. However, rarely has this association been empirically examined in this population. Methods: We conducted a meta-analysis to quantitatively summarize correlations between performance on facial emotion recognition tasks and theoretically related variables broadly related to social functioning and other cognitive abilities. Results: Sixty-two correlation coefficients from 27 separate articles met our inclusion criteria. Correlations between the ability to recognize facial expressions (FER) and each category of variables were moderate but significant in the expected direction. FER was positively correlated with age, nonverbal and verbal intelligence, Theory of Mind, and adaptive functioning, and negatively correlated with alexithymia and higher ASD symptoms. Conclusions: The findings of this meta-analysis indicate that FER abilities represent an important social cognitive ability given its relation to real-world social behavior and other characteristics and cognitive abilities. However, the striking lack of studies in this area calls for more research to gain a clearer understanding of the developmental significance of FER, especially in relation to the broader social impairment characteristic of ASD. Crown Copyright (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.