Difficulties in Emotion Recognition from Body Movements in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit significant impairments in social interaction and emotion recognition. Body movements serve as a critical emotional cue, but findings on recognition of affective body movements in ASD remain inconsistent. Methods: This meta-analysis reviewed 12 studies with 390 ASD participants and 396 typically developing (TD) participants. Results: ASD individuals showed overall lower performance in emotion recognition from body movements compared to TD individuals (Hedge’s g = -0.961, p < 0.001), particularly for happiness (g = -0.650, p < 0.01) and fear (g = -0.660, p < 0.05), with no significant differences in neutral emotions. The effect size of emotion recognition difficulties was comparable across different cues of body movements, facial expressions, and vocal prosody. Older age increased the ASD-TD gap, while higher IQ narrowed the difference. Further reviews suggested that this deficit also extended to subclinical populations, and the ASD group had abnormal functions in brain regions involved in visual processing and social cognition. Conclusions: These findings help comprehensively understand emotion recognition ability in ASD and have implications for developing targeted future interventions.