Why do some studies find that autistic people struggle with "reading" emotions from biological motion, while others don't?

Junior research fellow at CHIC Yelena Gavrilova, as part of the Center's scientific team, conducted the first systematic analysis of studies in this area and concluded that the reason may lie in methodological inconsistency. Emotion perception through movement in autism is not a single deficit but a complex profile, and specific study results depend on the type of experimental task.
The article has been published in the journal Research in Autism by Elsevier. 

"Emotion recognition is a complex process, critically important for successful social interaction. For autistic individuals, it can be impaired due to specific features of their sensory, motor, and social profiles. While emotion perception from faces and voices has been studied relatively well, recognizing emotions from body movement remains a significantly underexplored area," shared Yelena Gavrilova.

To systematize the accumulated data, a group of researchers from CHIC reviewed PubMed and ScienceDirect databases and selected 16 publications comparing emotion perception from movement in autistic and non-autistic individuals.
The focus was on three key methodological aspects: experimental tasks, stimulus characteristics, and types of control tasks. Analysis of the studies revealed significant methodological inconsistency in the field. Seven different types of tasks were identified, but most work concentrated on just two. Autistic participants showed greater difficulties with some task types compared to non-autistic ones, while performing equally well on others. This means the observed effect largely depends on experimental conditions. The set of emotions used was too narrow for broad generalizations, and comparisons with control tasks pointed to challenges in extracting emotional meaning from movement, rather than processing movement or emotions separately.

Based on this analysis, the authors propose several methodological recommendations to make future research in this area more consistent and informative.
The full article is available here: Understanding emotions through biological motion in autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review