Deficits in emotion recognition have been well documented in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, recent review articles have reported that tudies of emotion recognition in ASD have yielded mixed results. This may have resulted from the various descriptions of "emotion recognition" in previous studies. In order to have the same operational description among studies, it is necessary to describe emotion recognition as the establishment of the stimulus–response (S–R) relation. Although behavioral interpretations of other cognitive/developmental important phenomena such as theory of mind and joint attention have been conducted, no study has presented a behavior-analytic conceptualization of emotion recognition in the context of autism research. In order for behavioral interpretation of emotion recognition, it is important to identify vari-ables that control behavior, "recognizing emotion," in the interaction between an individual and another person. This paper concludes with a discussion of the deficits in emotion recognition in individuals with ASD and suggestions for future research are made.

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