Static and dynamic emotional body processing in autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review

Background. The ability to perceive and interpret emotional cues from others’ bodily movements is fundamental to adaptive social behaviour and survival. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) involves persistent difficulties in integrating perceptual and motor representations and marked impairments in social cognition, particularly for emotional cues. Yet, despite extensive research on facial and vocal emotion recognition, emotional body expressions remain relatively understudied in ASD. This systematic review synthesizes current evidence on body emotion recognition (BER) in ASD. Objective: This systematic review aims to synthesize the existing evidence on body emotion recognition (BER) in individuals with ASD, examining whether recognition performance differs between static and dynamic body expressions relative to typically developing (TD) individuals across the lifespan. Methods. A systematic review was conducted in PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, following PRISMA guidelines. Eligible studies examined recognition of basic emotions from body cues in individuals with ASD compared with typically developing (TD) controls, using behavioural and/or neuroimaging paradigms. Nineteen studies met inclusion criteria, comprising 620 individuals with ASD and 634 TD participants. Results. Individuals with ASD showed reduced accuracy in recognizing emotions conveyed by body expressions compared with TD controls. This difference emerged predominantly in studies using dynamic body expressions, whereas recognition of static body postures was largely preserved. Neuroimaging findings converge in showing atypical responses to emotional body stimuli in ASD, particularly within the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), which control motor-perceptual network, and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), as well as premotor regions involved in action observation and socio-emotional processing. Conclusions. These findings suggest that ASD preferentially encodes kinematic features of implied body movement over emotional meaning. Atypical action prediction may further disrupt processing of dynamic, but not static, emotional body cues. Together, the evidence indicates that altered processing of emotional body movement is a characteristic feature of social–motor dysfunction in ASD and highlights the need to control implied motion in studies of emotional body expression recognition in autism.