People with autism have trouble recognizing facial expressions and judging the emotional tone of spoken words — or at least, that's what many researchers say. But some studies have found that not to be true.The reason for these contradictory results could be that the studies tested the response to emotions of different types and intensity, says Ruth Grossman of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Her team has found that kids with autism seem to have trouble only when identifying subtle, real-life emotions, rather than the gross exaggerations of fear or happiness that are rare in the real world.To test this, as she explained at a poster session yesterday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Chicago, Grossman designed a simple task.Read more at...SFARI, May 2009.