Closed parents can give birth to autistic children

Not only do autistic children see the world in a different way than most of us, it seems that their parents also do it.

Some parents of autistic children assessed the emotional expression on facial expressions in a remarkably similar way for people with mental disorders, even though they did not place themselves in autism.

This finding reinforces the link between genes and autism, and may help show the genes responsible for the behavioral characteristics of this syndrome.

Ralph Adolphs from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (USA) and his colleagues conducted psychological tests on 42 parents of autistic children.

Based on these tests, they ranked 15 parents in which they were "socially closed", meaning that they did not like to participate in small conversations, with very few friends sharing and support each other.

Children with autism can inherit from mental disorders of their parents.(Photo: corbis)

Both these groups of parents and parents of 20 children without autism are then asked to see a series of faces and assess whether those people look happy or frightened.

If people with autism are often struggling to read emotions on other people's faces, then all three parent groups are given the same score for this task, guessing right in about 83% of the time.

However, when the research team learned how parents evaluated faces, they found that a group of closed parents had autistic children primarily looking at the portraits of their portraits, rather than into their eyes. .

"This is an amazing resemblance to what we previously reported about autistic individuals," Adolphs said.

In contrast, people without autism often observe others' eyes to read their feelings.

Previous studies have shown that siblings of autistic children often spend a considerable amount of time looking at others' mouths when communicating, but this is the first time this has been found on parents.

"It strongly supports the view that there is a genetic basis for autism," said Angelica Ronald, an autism researcher at Kings University in London.

Ronald said the next step would be to test these parents for other autistic features, such as communication problems or repetitive behaviors.