Dataset Information

Aberrant motor contagion of emotions in psychopathy and high-functioning autism.

ABSTRACT: Psychopathy and autism are both associated with aberrant social skills and empathy, yet only psychopaths are markedly antisocial and violent. Here, we compared the functional neural alterations underlying these two groups that both have aberrant empathetic abilities but distinct behavioral phenotypes. We studied 19 incarcerated male offenders with high psychopathic traits, 20 males with high-functioning autism, and 19 age-matched healthy controls. All groups underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while they viewed dynamic happy, angry, and disgusted faces or listened to laughter and crying sounds. Psychopathy was associated with reduced somatomotor responses to almost all expressions, while participants with autism demonstrated less marked and emotion-specific alterations in the somatomotor area. These data suggest that psychopathy and autism involve both common and distinct functional alterations in the brain networks involved in the socioemotional processing. The alterations are more profound in psychopathy, possibly reflecting the more severely disturbed socioemotional brain networks in this population.

SUBMITTER: Sun L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9837606 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Aberrant motor contagion of emotions in psychopathy and high-functioning autism.

Sun Lihua L Lukkarinen Lasse L Noppari Tuomo T Nazari-Farsani Sanaz S Putkinen Vesa V Seppälä Kerttu K Hudson Matthew M Tani Pekka P Lindberg Nina N Karlsson Henry K HK Hirvonen Jussi J Salomaa Marja M Venetjoki Niina N Lauerma Hannu H Tiihonen Jari J Nummenmaa Lauri L

Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) 20221201 2

Psychopathy and autism are both associated with aberrant social skills and empathy, yet only psychopaths are markedly antisocial and violent. Here, we compared the functional neural alterations underlying these two groups that both have aberrant empathetic abilities but distinct behavioral phenotypes. We studied 19 incarcerated male offenders with high psychopathic traits, 20 males with high-functioning autism, and 19 age-matched healthy controls. All groups underwent functional magnetic resonan ...[more]

PMID: 35332920

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Project description:BackgroundIt is widely accepted that emotion processing difficulties are involved in Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). An increasing number of studies have focused on the development of training programs and have shown promising results. However, most of these programs are appropriate for individuals with high-functioning ASC (HFA) but exclude individuals with low-functioning ASC (LFA). We have developed a computer-based game called JeStiMulE based on logical skills to teach emotions to individuals with ASC, independently of their age, intellectual, verbal and academic level. The aim of the present study was to verify the usability of JeStiMulE (which is its adaptability, effectiveness and efficiency) on a heterogeneous ASC group. We hypothesized that after JeStiMulE training, a performance improvement would be found in emotion recognition tasks.MethodsA heterogeneous group of thirty-three children and adolescents with ASC received two one-hour JeStiMulE sessions per week over four weeks. In order to verify the usability of JeStiMulE, game data were collected for each participant. Furthermore, all participants were presented before and after training with five emotion recognition tasks, two including pictures of game avatars (faces and gestures) and three including pictures of real-life characters (faces, gestures and social scenes).ResultsDescriptive data showed suitable adaptability, effectiveness and efficiency of JeStiMulE. Results revealed a significant main effect of Session on avatars (ANOVA: F (1,32) = 98.48, P < .001) and on pictures of real-life characters (ANOVA: F (1,32) = 49.09, P < .001). A significant Session × Task × Emotion interaction was also found for avatars (ANOVA: F (6,192) = 2.84, P = .01). This triple interaction was close to significance for pictures of real-life characters (ANOVA: F (12,384) = 1.73, P = .057). Post-hoc analyses revealed that 30 out of 35 conditions found a significant increase after training.ConclusionsJeStiMulE appears to be a promising tool to teach emotion recognition not only to individuals with HFA but also those with LFA. JeStiMulE is thus based on ASC-specific skills, offering a model of logical processing of social information to compensate for difficulties with intuitive social processing.Trial registrationComité de Protection des Personnes Sud Méditerranée V (CPP): reference number 11.046 (https://cpp-sud-mediterranee-v.fr/).

Project description:BACKGROUND: The objective of this study was to examine differences in episodic memory retrieval between individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) individuals. Previous studies have shown that personality similarities between readers and characters facilitated reading comprehension. Highly extraverted participants read stories featuring extraverted protagonists more easily and judged the outcomes of such stories more rapidly than did less extraverted participants. Similarly, highly neurotic participants judged the outcomes of stories with neurotic protagonists more rapidly than did participants with low levels of neuroticism. However, the impact of the similarity effect on memory retrieval remains unclear. This study tested our 'similarity hypothesis', namely that memory retrieval is enhanced when readers with ASD and TD readers read stories featuring protagonists with ASD and with characteristics associated with TD individuals, respectively. METHODS: Eighteen Japanese individuals (one female) with high-functioning ASD (aged 17 to 40 years) and 17 age- and intelligence quotient (IQ)-matched Japanese (one female) TD participants (aged 22 to 40 years) read 24 stories; 12 stories featured protagonists with ASD characteristics, and the other 12 featured TD protagonists. Participants read a single sentence at a time and pressed a spacebar to advance to the next sentence. After reading all 24 stories, they were asked to complete a recognition task about the target sentence in each story. RESULTS: To investigate episodic memory in ASD, we analyzed encoding based on the reading times for and readability of the stories and retrieval processes based on the accuracy of and response times for sentence recognition. Although the results showed no differences between ASD and TD groups in encoding processes, they did reveal inter-group differences in memory retrieval. Although individuals with ASD demonstrated the same level of accuracy as did TD individuals, their patterns of memory retrieval differed with respect to response times. CONCLUSIONS: Individuals with ASD more effectively retrieved ASD-congruent than ASD-incongruent sentences, and TD individuals retrieved stories with TD more effectively than stories with ASD protagonists. Thus, similarity between reader and story character had different effects on memory retrieval in the ASD and TD groups.

Dataset Information

Aberrant motor contagion of emotions in psychopathy and high-functioning autism.

Publications

Aberrant motor contagion of emotions in psychopathy and high-functioning autism.

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