Young people with autism make the same mistakes when identifying facial expressions as those who do not, a study has revealed.

The research, published by Bristol’s School of Experimental Psychology, tested the hypothesis that children diagnosed with autism find it hard to distinguish between facial expressions.

Around 64 children with autism and 64 who did not were given an internet-based test of emotion recognitions.

The two groups, aged between 6 and 16, were presented with ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘surprised’, ‘disgusted’, ‘scared’, and ‘angry’ facial expressions, and were asked to select a label that best matched the expression.

Each expression had several difficulty levels – some with highly exaggerated faces, while others were more life-like.

The team said the harder to recognise expressions were considered more relevant to real world interactions.

They found that the types of mistakes made by young people with autism were very similar to the types of mistakes made by young people without autism.

Both groups often mistook ‘fear’ for ‘surprise’, and confused ‘disgust’ and ‘anger’, says the report.

The major difference between the two groups was in identifying “high-intensity” expressions.

Sarah Griffiths, of the University of Bristol, said: “This study is important as previous research provided very mixed results with some finding individuals with autism less accurate in recognising expressions on average, and others finding no difference. In this study we used an online platform to run a larger study to answer this question more conclusively and found that individuals with autism are on average a bit less accurate at recognising emotion from faces.”