How Does Difficulty with Abstract Thinking Affect Recognizing Emotions in Others in Autism?
Many autistic people process information in a concrete, literal way. While this thinking style often brings honesty and attention to detail, it can make abstract or nuanced aspects of social communication more difficult to interpret. According to Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS, autistic children and adults often find it challenging to infer others’ emotions or mental states, partly because understanding emotions requires abstract thinking and perspective-taking.
The Link Between Abstract Thinking and Emotion Recognition
Recognising how someone else feels involves more than observing facial expressions. It requires theory of mind, the ability to understand another person’s internal perspective, and to interpret nonliteral cues such as sarcasm, tone, and context.
The National Autistic Society explains that autistic people do not lack empathy but may struggle with interpreting these abstract emotional cues. These differences stem from how information is processed rather than from an absence of caring or feeling.
According to Autistica’s guidance on communication, autistic individuals may miss figurative language or emotional subtleties that rely on inference, making it harder to connect observed behaviours to emotional meanings. This is especially true when emotional cues are mixed or context dependent.
What Research Shows
Recent studies help explain the connection between abstract thinking and emotion recognition in autism.
A 2025 study by Bar et al., published in Autism Research, found that autistic children’s ability to recognise emotions was strongly influenced by cognitive empathy and emotional language two abstract skills that link perception to social understanding (PubMed link). When children developed a stronger vocabulary for emotions, their ability to identify others’ feelings improved as well.
A large 2025 review by Ghanouni et al. confirmed that mentalising and abstract reasoning are essential for emotion recognition in autism. The authors showed that difficulties with higher-order cognitive skills, such as reasoning about others’ feelings or motivations, contribute directly to misunderstandings in social contexts (PMC link).
Similarly, Eden et al. (2025) demonstrated that autistic children who struggled to interpret complex or abstract mental states also showed greater difficulty identifying emotions on faces or in stories. This supports the idea that theory-of-mind differences, rather than a lack of emotional capacity, underlie these challenges (PubMed link).
Finally, Ng et al. (2025) provided evidence that co-occurring alexithymia, or difficulty identifying and understanding emotions, plays a significant role in emotion-recognition difficulties. Autistic adults with higher alexithymia scores had more trouble interpreting facial emotions, particularly those involving subtle or abstract feelings such as pride or guilt (PubMed link).
How to Support Emotional Understanding
Evidence-based strategies show that emotion recognition can be improved when abstract emotional information is made more concrete and visual.
NHS guidance recommends social stories, emotion cards, and explicit emotion-labeling exercises to help autistic people connect facial expressions, body language, and tone with specific feelings.
Structured programs that teach emotional vocabulary and perspective-taking can build both empathy and confidence.
The National Autistic Society also highlights the importance of recognising that empathy in autism often works differently. Many autistic people experience cognitive empathy challenges (difficulty inferring others’ emotions) but show strong affective empathy (feeling concern or care once they understand another’s state). Supporting both aspects through explicit emotional teaching helps bridge this gap.
Practical Steps That Help
Families, educators, and clinicians can support emotion recognition in autism through:
- Visual emotion charts or digital emotion tools to show expressions and feelings side by side
- Role-play or video modelling, helping link real expressions to emotional concepts
- Explicit emotion vocabulary training, introducing words like “frustrated” or “disappointed” with clear definitions and examples
- Perspective-taking games that encourage thinking about how others might feel in different situations
- CBT or mindfulness programs that build awareness of both self and others’ emotions
When emotional concepts are presented clearly and concretely, autistic individuals can better understand and respond to others’ feelings.
Takeaway
Difficulties with abstract thinking do not mean autistic people are unemotional or lack empathy. They simply process information differently. By turning emotional cues into structured, visual, and language-based concepts, emotion recognition becomes much more accessible.
If you or your child is exploring signs of autism, you can arrange a private autism assessment online with Autism Detect. Their CQC-rated “Good” clinical team provides assessments for both adults and children, helping you understand how thinking style influences emotion, empathy, and communication.
