A new Stanford University study finds that autistic children have “aberrant functional connectivity between voice-sensitive auditory cortex and the bilateral TPJ during emotional prosody processing.”

What does this mean in the context of Vibes, and affective computing in general?

For many autistic people, the conclusion that many have trouble processing emotional prosody is rather obvious, expecially when they are speaking with allistic (non-autistic) people.

The paper does not mention whether the corpus of prosody data included autistic people, but given Milton’s double empathy research, it’s clear that this matters.

Double empathy means that people of different demographics, in particular neurotypes, struggle to perceive each other’s emotions in order to empathize. Double empathy is bidirectional by definition, and not the problem nor responsibility of only one party in a conversation.

For a long time, studies like this one were used to justify labeling autistic communication as wrong and necessary to correct or “normalize.”

But by definition, for effective communication to occur, it must be mutually intelligible by all parties.

So when asked about how this research sits within my understanding of emotional perception, my answer is that we can accept that different brains process the same information differently, and that these circuits can be generalized across a given neurotype (to an extent).

But this does not mean that we need to accept placing the burden of modifying communication solely on one party, because they diverge from the (neuro)typical pattern.

This is also an opportunity for us to redefine what successful communication looks like, and to make room for new lenses to view the same information differently.

If you’d like to try Vibes for Apple Watch, you can download it here.

Source: Simon Leipold, Daniel A. Abrams, Shelby Karraker, Jennifer M. Phillips, Vinod Menon, “Aberrant Emotional Prosody Circuitry Predicts Social Communication Impairments in Children With Autism.” Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2022.09.016.