Autism
People with autism are often unable to judge when a face conveys emotions such as happiness or sadness, and many researchers take this as evidence that autism involves serious deficits in processing social information. Yet the voice, too, can provide emotional cues, and several recent studies indicate that when listening to voices, people with autism can actually recognize feelings and other traits of humanness as well as – or even better than – neurotypical people do. The studies suggest that at least for some subgroups of autistic people in certain situations, deficits in identifying emotions could be confined primarily to vision. ‘This is great news from a treatment perspective,’ says researcher Kevin Pelphrey at George Washington University. ‘It is much easier to help someone overcome an inability to read emotion from faces than it would be to treat a fundamental lack of understanding of emotion from all modalities.’