Embodied and Disembodied Emotion Processing: Learning From and About Typical and Autistic Individuals

Social life is filled with emotional information. Friends smile and embrace. Enemies frown and shrug. Lovers flirt with eyes and bodies. Sales people may grin and rattle with excitement or give us that “don’t bother me” look, just as students may look at us with admiration or boredom. Cats and dogs, too, wiggle with joy or tremble with anxiety. Even computers tease us with emoticons or flash alluring images on Web pages, and fast food restaurants and big box stores greet us with smiley faces. We are also often exposed to emotional scenes in the movies and television, ranging from uplifting, cute and delightful to painful, horrifying and disgusting. Much emotional information is perceived and understood within a blink of an eye, prompting us to like or dislike, approach or avoid, engage or disengage. Clearly, social interaction frequently requires us to recognize emotion from facial, vocal, and postural information. This recognition may then influence our physiology, motivation, behavior, thought, and judgment. But how does this process work? And how does it go awry? In this article, we argue that new insights into how humans perceive, learn, understand, represent, and use emotionally significant information can be offered by looking at individuals with atypical social-emotional functioning, such as individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Further, we argue that understanding of both autism and emotion can be advanced by theories of embodied cognition. That is, we aim to show how our understanding of autism has benefited from what we have learned about emotion embodiment, just as our understanding of emotion embodiment has benefited from what we have learned about autism. To accomplish this, we first introduce embodiment theories of emotion, sketch out some of the underlying neural mechanisms, and provide background information on autism. Then, Abstract