Response to McKenzie et al. 2021: Keep It Simple; Young Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Intellectual Disability Can Process Basic Emotions

We recently read the interesting and informative paper entitled “Empathic accuracy and cognitive and affective empathy in young adults with and without autism spectrum disorder” (McKenzie et al. in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 52: 1–15, 2021). This paper expands recent findings from our lab (Ben-David in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 50: 741-756, 2020a; International Journal of Audiology 60: 319–321, 2020b) and a recent theoretical framework (Icht et al. in Autism Research 14: 1948–1964, 2021) that may suggest a new purview for McKenzie et al.’s results. Namely, these papers suggest that young adults with autism spectrum disorder without intellectual disability can successfully recruit their cognitive abilities to distinguish between different simple spoken emotions, but may still face difficulties processing complex, subtle emotions. McKenzie et al. (Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 52: 1–15, 2021) extended these findings to the processing of emotions in video clips, with both visual and auditory information.