Emotional modulation of perception in Asperger's syndrome

Equivalent own name bias in autism: An EEG study of the Attentional Blink

The "Attentional Blink" refers to difficulty in detecting the second of two target stimuli presented in rapid temporal succession. Studies have shown that salient target stimuli, such as one's own name, reduce the magnitude of this effect. Given indications that self-related processing is altered in autism, it is an open question whether this attentional self-bias is reduced in autism. To investigate this, in the current study we utilised an Attentional Blink paradigm involving one's own and others' names, in a group of 24 autistic adults, and 22 neurotypical adults, while measuring EEG. In line with previous studies, the Attentional Blink was reduced when the participant's own name was the second target, with no differences between autistic and neurotypical participants. ERP results show that the effect on the Attentional Blink of one's own name was reflected in increased N2 and P3 amplitudes, for both autistic and nonautistic individuals. This is the first event-related potential study of own-name processing in the context of the Attentional Blink. The results provide evidence of an intact attentional self-bias in autism, both at the behavioural and neural level.

Eye-Tracking Studies in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Eye-tracking studies have shown potential in effectively discriminating between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and non-ASD groups. The main objective of the present study was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of eye-tracking studies in adults with ASD. A total of 22 studies were included for meta-analysis. Eyes and Non-Social regions proved better for discriminating between ASD and non-ASD adults, while fixation duration seems to be the outcome to choose. Active engaged tasks seem to reduce differences between ASD and non-ASD adults, regardless of the emotional content of the stimuli/task. Proportional fixation duration on eyes and non-social areas in non-active tasks (e.g. free viewing) seems to be the best eye-tracking design for increasing the sensitivity and specificity in ASD adults.

Autistic-traits, not anxiety, modulate implicit emotional guidance of attention in neurotypical adults

Although autistic and anxious traits are positively correlated, high levels of autistic traits are associated with poorer emotional guidance of attention (EGA) whilst high levels of anxious traits are associated with greater EGA. In order to better understand how these two trait dimensions influence EGA, we simultaneously examined the effects of anxiety and autistic traits in neurotypical adults on target identification in an attentional blink task. Analyses indicated that implicit EGA is attenuated in individuals with higher levels of autistic traits, but largely unaffected by variation in anxious traits. Our results suggest that anxiety plays a comparatively limited role in modulating implicit EGA and reinforces the importance of disentangling correlated individual differences when exploring the effects of personality, including emotional predisposition, on attention.

Enhanced cognitive processing by viewing snakes in children with autism spectrum disorder. A preliminary study

BACKGROUND

Prioritization of the processing of threatening stimuli induces deleterious effects on task performance. However, emotion evoked by viewing images of snakes exerts a facilitating effect upon making judgments of their color in neurotypical adults and schoolchildren. We attempted to confirm this in school and preschool children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

METHODS

Forty French children participated and corresponded to two age groups: a group of schoolchildren and a group of preschool children, each group including 10 children with typical development and 10 children with ASD. Each participant was exposed to 120 trials composed of 20 photographs of snakes and 20 photographs of flowers, each of which appeared 3 times (in red, green and blue). Participants were asked to indicate the color of each image as quickly as possible via key-press. A three-way analysis of variance test for reaction time (RT) considering image type (IMAGE), participant group (PARTICIPANT), and age (AGE) as main effects and its interaction terms was performed for each subject.

RESULTS

When the reaction time required to respond to presented stimuli was measured, schoolchildren tended to respond faster when stimuli were snake images than when stimuli were flower images whether the children had or did not have ASD. For the 5-to-6-year-old preschool participants, the difference between reaction time for the color-naming of snake images and flower images was ambiguous overall.

CONCLUSIONS

There were possible odd color-specific effects in children with ASD when images were presented to the children in green. Implications of the findings are argued with respect to active avoidance or attraction as one of the behavioral characteristics commonly noted in children with ASD.

Inflexibility in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Need for certainty and atypical emotion processing share the blame

Although ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) diagnosis requires the co-occurrence of socio-emotional deficits and inflexible behaviors, the interaction between these two domains remains unexplored. We used an emotional Wisconsin Card Sorting Test adapted to fMRI to explore this question. ASD and control participants matched a central card (a face) with one of four surrounding cards according to one of three rules: frame color, facial identity or expression. Feedback informed participants on whether to change or maintain the current sorting rule. For each rule, we modeled feedback onsets to change, switch (confirming the newly found rule) and maintenance events. "Bias error", which measures participants' willingness to switch, was larger in ASD participants for the emotional sorting rule. Brain activity to change events showed no group differences. In response to switch events significantly larger activity was observed for ASD participants in bilateral Inferior Parietal Sulci. Inflexibility in ASD appears characterized by the unwillingness to switch toward processing socio-emotional information, rather than a major disruption in cognitive flexibility. However, a larger activity to switch events in ASD highlights the need for a higher level of certainty before setting into a stable processing stage, which may be particularly detrimental in the highly changeable socio-emotional environment.

Specific Patterns of Emotion Recognition from Faces in Children with ASD: Results of a Cross-Modal Matching Paradigm

Children with ASD show emotion recognition difficulties, as part of their social communication deficits. We examined facial emotion recognition (FER) in intellectually disabled children with ASD and in younger typically developing (TD) controls, matched on mental age. Our emotion-matching paradigm employed three different modalities: facial, vocal and verbal. Results confirmed overall FER deficits in ASD. Compared to the TD group, children with ASD had the poorest performance in recognizing surprise and anger in comparison to happiness and sadness, and struggled with face-face matching, compared to voice-face and word-face combinations. Performance in the voice-face cross-modal recognition task was related to adaptive communication. These findings highlight the specific face processing deficit, and the relative merit of cross-modal integration in children with ASD.

Autism Pathogenesis: The Superior Colliculus

After been exposed to the visual input, in the first year of life, the brain experiences subtle but massive changes apparently crucial for communicative/emotional and social human development. Its lack could be the explanation of the very high prevalence of autism in children with total congenital blindness. The present theory postulates that the superior colliculus is the key structure for such changes for several reasons: it dominates visual behavior during the first months of life; it is ready at birth for complex visual tasks; it has a significant influence on several hemispheric regions; it is the main brain hub that permanently integrates visual and non-visual, external and internal information (bottom-up and top-down respectively); and it owns the enigmatic ability to take non-conscious decisions about where to focus attention. It is also a sentinel that triggers the subcortical mechanisms which drive social motivation to follow faces from birth and to react automatically to emotional stimuli. Through indirect connections it also activates simultaneously several cortical structures necessary to develop social cognition and to accomplish the multiattentional task required for conscious social interaction in real life settings. Genetic or non-genetic prenatal or early postnatal factors could disrupt the SC functions resulting in autism. The timing of postnatal biological disruption matches the timing of clinical autism manifestations. Astonishing coincidences between etiologies, clinical manifestations, cognitive and pathogenic autism theories on one side and SC functions on the other are disclosed in this review. Although the visual system dependent of the SC is usually considered as accessory of the LGN canonical pathway, its imprinting gives the brain a qualitatively specific functions not supplied by any other brain structure.

Impaired detection of happy facial expressions in autism

The detection of emotional facial expressions plays an indispensable role in social interaction. Psychological studies have shown that typically developing (TD) individuals more rapidly detect emotional expressions than neutral expressions. However, it remains unclear whether individuals with autistic phenotypes, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and high levels of autistic traits (ATs), are impaired in this ability. We examined this by comparing TD and ASD individuals in Experiment 1 and individuals with low and high ATs in Experiment 2 using the visual search paradigm. Participants detected normal facial expressions of anger and happiness and their anti-expressions within crowds of neutral expressions. In Experiment 1, reaction times were shorter for normal angry expressions than for anti-expressions in both TD and ASD groups. This was also the case for normal happy expressions vs. anti-expressions in the TD group but not in the ASD group. Similarly, in Experiment 2, the detection of normal vs. anti-expressions was faster for angry expressions in both groups and for happy expressions in the low, but not high, ATs group. These results suggest that the detection of happy facial expressions is impaired in individuals with ASD and high ATs, which may contribute to their difficulty in creating and maintaining affiliative social relationships.

Effect of emotions on temporal attention

Emotions play a significant role in guiding everyday actions and strongly interact with attention. The processing of emotional information over time and the influence of attention on such processing has been studied through the phenomenon of attentional blink using rapid serial visual presentations (RSVP) tasks. This chapter discusses the interaction between temporal attention and the type of emotional information (words, scenes, and facial expressions) presented during or before the RSVP stream. The findings show that the affective content and the arousal value of the emotional stimuli presented as first target, second target, or both affects the magnitude and the duration of the blink window. In addition, modulation of emotional context or presentation of emotions in the RSVP stream as task irrelevant distractors also influenced attentional blink. Further, this chapter discusses different models and theories of attentional blink and attempts to explain the emotional effects. The chapter concludes with possible scope for future studies.

Threatening faces fail to guide attention for adults with autistic-like traits

Individuals diagnosed with autistic spectrum conditions often show deficits in processing emotional faces relative to neurotypical peers. However, little is known about whether similar deficits exist in neurotypical individuals who show high-levels of autistic-like traits. To address this question, we compared performance on an attentional blink task in a large sample of adults who showed low- or high-levels of autistic-like traits on the Autism Spectrum Quotient. We found that threatening faces inserted as the second target in a rapid serial visual presentation were identified more accurately among individuals with low- compared to high-levels of autistic-like traits. This is the first study to show that attentional blink abnormalities seen in autism extend to the neurotypical population with autistic-like traits, adding to the growing body of research suggesting that autistic-related patterns of behaviors extend into a subset of the neurotypical population. Autism Res 2017, 10: 311-320. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Processing of emotion words by patients with autism spectrum disorders: evidence from reaction times and EEG

This study investigated processing of emotion words in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) using reaction times and event-related potentials (ERP). Adults with (n = 21) and without (n = 20) ASD performed a lexical decision task on emotion and neutral words while their brain activity was recorded. Both groups showed faster responses to emotion words compared to neutral, suggesting intact early processing of emotion in ASD. In the ERPs, the control group showed a typical late positive component (LPC) at 400-600 ms for emotion words compared to neutral, while the ASD group showed no LPC. The between-group difference in LPC amplitude was significant, suggesting that emotion words were processed differently by individuals with ASD, although their behavioral performance was similar to that of typical individuals.

Measuring autistic traits in the general population: a systematic review of the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) in a nonclinical population sample of 6,900 typical adult males and females

The Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) is a self-report measure of autistic traits. It is frequently cited in diverse fields and has been administered to adults of at least average intelligence with autism and to nonclinical controls, as well as to clinical control groups such as those with schizophrenia, prosopagnosia, anorexia, and depression. However, there has been no empirical systematic review of the AQ since its inception in 2001. The present study reports a comprehensive systematic review of the literature to estimate a reliable mean AQ score in individuals without a diagnosis of an autism spectrum condition (ASC), in order to establish a reference norm for future studies. A systematic search of computerized databases was performed to identify studies that administered the AQ to nonclinical participant samples representing the adult male and female general population. Inclusion was based on a set of formalized criteria that evaluated the quality of the study, the usage of the AQ, and the population being assessed. After selection, 73 articles, detailing 6,934 nonclinical participants, as well as 1,963 matched clinical cases of ASC (from available cohorts within each individual study), were analyzed. Mean AQ score for the nonclinical population was 16.94 (95% CI 11.6, 20.0), while mean AQ score for the clinical population with ASC was found to be 35.19 (95% CI 27.6, 41.1). In addition, in the nonclinical population, a sex difference in autistic traits was found, although no sex difference in AQ score was seen in the clinical ASC population. These findings have implications for the study of autistic traits in the general population. Here, we confirm previous norms with more rigorous data and for the first time establish average AQ scores based on a systematic review, for populations of adult males and females with and without ASC. Finally, we advise future researchers to avoid risk of bias by carefully considering the recruitment strategy for both clinical and nonclinical groups and to demonstrate transparency by reporting recruitment methods for all participants.

Emotional language processing in autism spectrum disorders: a systematic review

In his first description of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), Kanner emphasized emotional impairments by characterizing children with ASD as indifferent to other people, self-absorbed, emotionally cold, distanced, and retracted. Thereafter, emotional impairments became regarded as part of the social impairments of ASD, and research mostly focused on understanding how individuals with ASD recognize visual expressions of emotions from faces and body postures. However, it still remains unclear how emotions are processed outside of the visual domain. This systematic review aims to fill this gap by focusing on impairments of emotional language processing in ASD. We systematically searched PubMed for papers published between 1990 and 2013 using standardized search terms. Studies show that people with ASD are able to correctly classify emotional language stimuli as emotionally positive or negative. However, processing of emotional language stimuli in ASD is associated with atypical patterns of attention and memory performance, as well as abnormal physiological and neural activity. Particularly, younger children with ASD have difficulties in acquiring and developing emotional concepts, and avoid using these in discourse. These emotional language impairments were not consistently associated with age, IQ, or level of development of language skills. We discuss how emotional language impairments fit with existing cognitive theories of ASD, such as central coherence, executive dysfunction, and weak Theory of Mind. We conclude that emotional impairments in ASD may be broader than just a mere consequence of social impairments, and should receive more attention in future research.

Affective and cognitive empathy in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder

The broad construct of empathy incorporates both cognitive and affective dimensions. Recent evidence suggests that the subjects with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) show a significant impairment in empathic ability. The aim of this study was to evaluate the cognitive and affective components of empathy in adolescents with ASD compared to controls. Fifteen adolescents with ASD and 15 controls underwent paper and pencil measures and a computerized Multifaceted Empathy Test. All measures were divided into mentalizing and experience sharing abilities. Adolescents with ASD compared to controls showed deficits in all mentalizing measures: they were incapable of interpreting and understanding the mental and emotional states of other people. Instead, in the sharing experience measures, the adolescents with ASD were able to empathize with the emotional experience of other people when they express emotions with positive valence, but were not able to do so when the emotional valence is negative. These results were confirmed by the computerized task. In conclusion, our results suggest that adolescents with ASD show a difficulty in cognitive empathy, whereas the deficit in affective empathy is specific for the negative emotional valence.

Impairment in emotional modulation of attention and memory in schizophrenia

Emotion plays a critical role in cognition and goal-directed behavior via complex interconnections between the emotional and motivational systems. It has been hypothesized that the impairment in goal-directed behavior widely noted in schizophrenia may result from defects in the interaction between the neural (ventral) emotional system and (rostral) cortical processes. The present study examined the impact of emotion on attention and memory in schizophrenia. Twenty-five individuals with schizophrenia related psychosis and 25 healthy control subjects were administered a computerized task in which they were asked to search for target images during a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation of pictures. Target stimuli were either positive or negative, or neutral images presented at either 200ms or 700ms lag. Additionally, a visual hedonic task was used to assess differences between the schizophrenia group and controls on ratings of valence and arousal from the picture stimuli. Compared to controls, individuals with schizophrenia detected fewer emotional images under both the 200ms and 700ms lag conditions. Multivariate analyses showed that the schizophrenia group also detected fewer positive images under the 700ms lag condition and fewer negative images under the 200ms lag condition. Individuals with schizophrenia reported higher pleasantness and unpleasantness ratings than controls in response to neutral stimuli, while controls reported higher arousal ratings for neutral and positive stimuli compared to the schizophrenia group. These results highlight dysfunction in the neural modulation of emotion, attention, and cortical processing in schizophrenia, adding to the growing but mixed body of literature on emotion processing in the disorder.

Linking social behaviour and anxiety to attention to emotional faces in Williams syndrome

The neurodevelopmental disorder Williams syndrome (WS) has been associated with a social phenotype of hypersociability, non-social anxiety and an unusual attraction to faces. The current study uses eye tracking to explore attention allocation to emotionally expressive faces. Eye gaze and behavioural measures of anxiety and social reciprocity were investigated in adolescents and adults with WS when compared to typically developing individuals of comparable verbal mental age (VMA) and chronological age (CA). Results showed significant associations between high levels of behavioural anxiety and attention allocation away from the eye regions of threatening facial expressions in WS. The results challenge early claims of a unique attraction to the eyes in WS and suggest that individual differences in anxiety may mediate the allocation of attention to faces in WS.

Modulation of attentional blink with emotional faces in typical development and in autism spectrum disorders

BACKGROUND

The attentional blink (AB) phenomenon was used to assess the effect of emotional information on early visual attention in typically developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The AB effect is the momentary perceptual unawareness that follows target identification in a rapid serial visual processing stream. It is abolished or reduced for emotional stimuli, indicating that emotional information has privileged access to early visual attention processes.

METHODS

We examined the AB effect for faces with neutral and angry facial expressions in 8- to 14-year-old children with and without an ASD diagnosis.

RESULTS

Children with ASD exhibited the same magnitude AB effect as TD children for both neutral and angry faces.

CONCLUSIONS

Early visual attention to emotional facial expressions was preserved in children with ASD.

The Interplay between Emotion and Cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Implications for Developmental Theory

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is clinically defined by abnormalities in reciprocal social and communicative behaviors and an inflexible adherence to routinised patterns of thought and behavior. Laboratory studies repeatedly demonstrate that autistic individuals experience difficulties in recognizing and understanding the emotional expressions of others and naturalistic observations show that they use such expressions infrequently and inappropriately to regulate social exchanges. Dominant theories attribute this facet of the ASD phenotype to abnormalities in a social brain network that mediates social-motivational and social-cognitive processes such as face processing, mental state understanding, and empathy. Such theories imply that only emotion related processes relevant to social cognition are compromised in ASD but accumulating evidence suggests that the disorder may be characterized by more widespread anomalies in the domain of emotions. In this review I summarize the relevant literature and argue that the social-emotional characteristics of ASD may be better understood in terms of a disruption in the domain-general interplay between emotion and cognition. More specifically I will suggest that ASD is the developmental consequence of early emerging anomalies in how emotional responses to the environment modulate a wide range of cognitive processes including those that are relevant to navigating the social world.

A lack of left visual field bias when individuals with autism process faces

It has been established that typically developing individuals have a bias to attend to facial information in the left visual field (LVF) more than in the right visual field. This bias is thought to arise from the right hemisphere's advantage for processing facial information, with evidence suggesting it to be driven by the configural demands of face processing. Considering research showing that individuals with autism have impaired face processing abilities, with marked deficits in configural processing, it was hypothesized that they would not demonstrate a LVF bias for faces. Eye-tracking technology was used to show that individuals with autism were not spontaneously biased to facial information in the LVF, in contrast to a control group, while discriminating facial gender.

Brief report: Attenuated emotional suppression of the attentional blink in Autism Spectrum Disorder: another non-social abnormality?

Twenty-five individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder and 25 typically developed individuals participated in an Attentional Blink paradigm to determine whether emotional words would capture attention similarly in the two groups. Whilst the emotionality of words facilitated attention in typical comparison participants, this effect was attenuated in the ASD group. The magnitude of the emotional modulation of attention in ASD also correlated significantly with participants' VIQ, which was not observed for the comparison group. Together these observations replicate and extend the findings of Corden et al. (J Autism Develop Disord 38:1072-1080, 2008) and implicate abnormalities in emotional processes outside the broader context of social cognition in ASD. We discuss our findings in relation to possible abnormalities in amygdala function that may underlie the disorder.

Brief report: inhibitory control of socially relevant stimuli in children with high functioning autism

The current study explored whether inhibitory control deficits in high functioning autism (HFA) emerged when socially relevant stimuli were used and whether arousal level affected the performance. A Go/NoGo paradigm, with socially relevant stimuli and varying presentation rates, was applied in 18 children with HFA (including children with autism or Asperger syndrome) and 22 typically developing children (aged 8-13 years). Children with HFA did not show inhibitory control deficits compared to the control group, but their performance deteriorated in the slow presentation rate condition. Findings were unrelated to children's abilities to recognize emotions. Hence, rather than a core deficit in inhibitory control, low arousal level in response to social stimuli might influence the responses given by children with HFA.