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Query: UMLS:C0004352 (autism)
 32,579 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Social interaction promotes survival by helping animals to form stable and supportive groups. Additionally, maladaptive social behavior is a hallmark of disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. In many different animal species, including humans, social interaction can be inherently rewarding. Lately there has been growing interest in studying the neurobiological underpinnings of social interaction and learned social behavior in rodent behavioral models. One common procedure is conditioned place preference (CPP) to measure the rewarding effects of social interaction and social reward learning. Social CPP was originally used in rats but has been adapted recently for use in mice, enabling use of the vast array of genetic tools available in mice. Here we studied the role of age, sex, bedding, and prior social isolation on the expression of social CPP in male and female mice. We found that without social deprivation male mice display moderate and temporary social CPP during early adolescence but not adulthood. Early life social isolation increased social CPP in female but not male mice. In contrast, cocaine CPP was robust and long-lasting in male and female mice. Our results demonstrate that social CPP in mice is variable, occurring under only specific conditions, and that social isolation promotes social reward in female but not male mice. We discuss potential methodological and interpretive issues of the mouse social CPP model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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PMID:Parametric investigation of social place preference in adolescent mice. 3267 90

Predictive processing accounts of autism posit that individuals with autism rely less on expectations than those without autism when it comes to interpreting incoming sensory information. Since these expectations are claimed to underlie all information processing, we reason that any differences in how they are formed or adjusted should be persistent across multiple cognitive domains and detectable much earlier than clinicians can currently diagnose autism, around 3 years of age. This experiment is part of a longitudinal prospective study of young children with increased familial likelihood of autism. Around 20% of these children will receive an autism diagnosis, compared to 1% of the general population. The current electroencephalography study used an adaptation paradigm to investigate whether a reduced effect of expectations is already present in high-likelihood 2-year-olds, before autism can reliably be diagnosed. While we did not observe the adaptation aftereffect we expected, high-likelihood children habituated more than low-likelihood children, and the two groups did not differ in their overall responses to the manipulation, contrary to our hypotheses and previous findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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PMID:No evidence for neural markers of gaze direction adaptation in 2-year-olds with high or low likelihood of autism. 3275 4

Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by impairments in social communication, restricted interests, and repetitive behaviors. Many studies have demonstrated atypical responses to audiovisual sensory inputs, particularly those containing sociolinguistic information. It is currently unclear whether these atypical responses are due to the linguistic nature of the inputs or the social aspect itself. Further, it is unclear how atypical sensory responses to sociocommunicative stimuli intersect with autism symptomatology. The current study addressed these outstanding questions by using pupillometry in mental age-matched children with and without autism (N = 71) to examine physiological responses to dynamic, audiovisual stimuli including social, sociolinguistic, socioemotional, and nonsocial stimuli, as well as to temporally manipulated stimuli. Data revealed group differences in pupillary responses with social stimuli but not nonsocial stimuli and, importantly, showed no variation through the inclusion of linguistic or emotional information. This suggests that atypical sensory responses are driven primarily by the inclusion of social information broadly. Further, individual responses to social stimuli were significantly correlated with a wide range of autism spectrum disorder symptomatology, including social communication, restricted interests and repetitive behaviors, and sensory processing issues. Pupillary responses to social but not nonsocial presentation were also capable of predicting diagnosis with a high level of selectivity, but only with marginal sensitivity. Finally, responses to the temporal manipulation did not yield any group differences, suggesting that while atypical multisensory temporal processing has been well documented in autism at the level of behavior and perception, these issues may be intact at the physiological level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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PMID:A pupillometry study of multisensory social and linguistic processing in autism and typical development. 3277 27

The most dominant theory of human social cognition, the theory of mind hypothesis, emphasizes our ability to infer the mental states of others. After having represented the mental states of another person, however, we can also have an idea of how well our thinking aligns with theirs, and our sensitivity to this alignment may guide the flow of our social interactions. Here, we focus on the distinction between "mindreading" (inferring another's mental representation) and detecting the extent to which a represented mental state of another person is matching or mismatching with our own (mental conflict monitoring). We propose a reframing for mentalizing data of the past 40 years in terms of mental conflict monitoring rather than mental representation. Via a systematic review of 51 false belief neuroimaging studies, we argue that key brain regions implicated in false belief designs (namely, temporoparietal junction areas) may methodologically be tied to mental conflict rather than to mental representation. Patterns of false belief data suggests that autism may be tied to a subtle issue with monitoring mental conflict combined with intact mental representation, rather than to lacking mental representation abilities or "mindblindness" altogether. The consequences of this view for the larger social-cognitive domain are explored, including for perspective taking, moral judgments, and understanding irony and humor. This provides a potential shift in perspective for psychological science, its neuroscientific bases, and related disciplines: Throughout life, an adequate sensitivity to how others think differently (relational mentalizing) may be more fundamental to navigating the social world than inferring which thoughts others have (representational mentalizing). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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PMID:Reframing social cognition: Relational versus representational mentalizing. 3285 61

Questions of how we know our own and other minds, and whether metacognition and mindreading rely on the same processes, are longstanding in psychology and philosophy. In Experiment 1, children/adolescents with autism (who tend to show attenuated mindreading) showed significantly lower accuracy on an explicit metacognition task than neurotypical children/adolescents, but not on an allegedly metacognitive implicit one. In Experiment 2, neurotypical adults completed these tasks in a single-task condition or a dual-task condition that required concurrent completion of a secondary task that tapped mindreading. Metacognitive accuracy was significantly diminished by the dual-mindreading-task on the explicit task but not the implicit task. In Experiment 3, we included additional dual-tasks to rule out the possibility that any secondary task (regardless of whether it required mindreading) would diminish metacognitive accuracy. Finally, in both Experiments 1 and 2, metacognitive accuracy on the explicit task, but not the implicit task, was associated significantly with performance on a measure of mindreading ability. These results suggest that explicit metacognitive tasks (used frequently to measure metacognition in humans) share metarepresentational processing resources with mindreading, whereas implicit tasks (which are claimed by some comparative psychologists to measure metacognition in nonhuman animals) do not. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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PMID:Linking metacognition and mindreading: Evidence from autism and dual-task investigations. 3291 16

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to explore the experience of accessing autism diagnosis and resources in a Midwest urban public school district for diverse mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder. Method: We employed thematic analysis using narrative inquiry methodology to analyze the data from 9 mothers (n = 5 African American, n = 2 Hispanic, and n = 2 White) who participated in a focus group. Results: Three themes were identified by the researchers: (a) late medical diagnosis (subthemes: problems that parents didn't perceive as signs of autism spectrum disorder, making comparisons to other siblings or children), (b) negative communication experiences (subthemes: husband and wife, parent and educational professionals), and (c) coping strategies (subthemes: resources, prayer). Discussion: The mothers' narratives indicated a strong need for advocacy and parent-school partnership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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PMID:"No one could calm him down": Mothers' experience of autism diagnosis and obtainment of resources in an urban public school district. 3295 83

People vary in their self-awareness of their own emotions, and this may predict psychological well-being. Evidence suggests that emotional self-awareness is diminished in autism, but these findings may be biased by self-report or confounded by verbal intelligence. To address this issue, we developed the emotional consistency (EC) task, measuring emotional self-awareness through consistency in emotional decision-making. In the EC-Task, we showed participants pairs of emotional images, asking them to judge which evoked the more intense emotional experience. The logical consistency of decision making, based on transitive relationships between stimuli, reflects precision of judgment of experience of emotional intensity, which in turn reflects emotional self-awareness. Emotional consistency significantly correlated with lower self-reported alexithymia but not autistic traits. Instead, autistic traits predicted greater discrepancy between EC-Task performance and self-reported difficulties identifying feelings. Participants with higher autistic traits were more likely to underestimate their emotional self-awareness, possibly because of greater metacognitive difficulties and negative self-beliefs. Our study suggests emotional self-awareness is not diminished in autism and provides a novel method to investigate this issue. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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PMID:Autistic traits predict underestimation of emotional abilities. 3300 89

The ability to recognize an individual face is essential to human social interaction. Even subtle errors in this process can have huge implications for the way we relate to social partners. Because autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by deficits in social interaction, researchers have theorized about the potential role of atypical face identity processing to the symptom profile of ASD for more than 40 years. We conducted an empirical meta-analysis of this large literature to determine whether and to what extent face identity processing is atypical in ASD compared to typically developing (TD) individuals. We also tested the hypotheses that the deficit is selective to face identity recognition, not perception, and that methodological variation across studies moderates the magnitude of the estimated deficit. We identified 112 studies (5,390 participants) that generated 172 effect sizes from both recognition (k = 119) and discrimination (k = 53) paradigms. We used state-of-the-art approaches for assessing the validity and robustness of the analyses. We found comparable and large deficits in ASD for both face identity recognition (Hedge's g = -0.86) and discrimination (Hedge's g = -0.82). This means that the score of an average ASD individual is nearly 1 SD below the average TD individual on tasks assessing both aspects of face identity processing. These deficits generalize across age groups, sex, IQ scores, and task paradigms. These findings suggest that deficits in face identity processing may represent a core deficit in ASD. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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PMID:A quantitative meta-analysis of face recognition deficits in autism: 40 years of research. 3310 76

Understanding the factors that influence the use of evidence-based practices (EBPs) for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in schools is critical to the selection of effective implementation strategies to support their sustained use. The current study has 2 aims: (a) evaluate the association between school leadership profiles (undifferentiated and optimal) and fidelity of EBP implementation and (b) examine the role of implementation climate as a mediator in this association. Participants included 56 principals, 90 special education teachers, and 133 classroom staff from 66 elementary schools. Participants completed the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire and Implementation Climate Scale. Teachers and staff reported on intensity (frequency) of EBP delivery, and the research team rated the accuracy (adherence) to the components of the EBP. Schools were required to implement at least 1 of 3 EBPs for ASD (discrete trial training, pivotal response training, or visual supports). Using structural equation modeling, we found that schools with optimal leadership had higher observed ratings of teacher and staff fidelity for pivotal response training accuracy (p < .05), but not for discrete trial training or visual supports. However, this association became nonsignificant with the introduction of implementation climate into the models. Optimal leadership profiles were linked to more positive teacher/staff-reported implementation climate, compared with undifferentiated profiles (p < .01), but found no association between implementation climate and fidelity. Overall, the results of this study indicate that the role of principal leadership in EBP implementation is complex, which has implications for fostering a conducive organizational implementation context in schools. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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PMID:Strengthening capacity for implementation of evidence-based practices for autism in schools: The roles of implementation climate, school leadership, and fidelity. 3325 48


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