Mothers of Nonspeaking Autistic Children Detect Happiness and Sadness from Facial Expressions in the Same Way As Mothers of Non-Autistic Children.

Autistic people can have relatively flat facial affect. Does parenting an autistic child increase mothers’ sensitivity to subtle facial displays of emotion? We found that mothers required less information to detect happiness than non-mothers, but happiness was detected earlier by mothers of both autistic and non-autistic children.