Demystifying Emotion-Processing: Autism & Alexithymia

Dr. Connor Keating is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and an experimental psychologist whose work focuses on emotion processing, movement, and social cognition in autism. He is also the co-director of the U21 Autism Research Network, a global collaboration of researchers and community members across 14 countries dedicated to addressing issues around diversity and inclusion in autism research.

Are differences in emotion processing truly a feature of autism, or are they better explained by co-occurring alexithymia? What helps autistic and non-autistic people understand their own and others’ emotions? In this talk, I will explore how autistic and non-autistic adults differ—or don’t—in how they conceptualise, experience, visualise, express, and recognise emotion, once alexithymia is accounted for, and present models that may explain the relationships between these processes for autistic and non-autistic people.