Autism and Cognition Within Epilepsy: Social Matters.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Tuchman R
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4532233 | biostudies-other | 2015 Jul-Aug
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
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Project description:Cooperation is vital for the survival of many species and has been extensively researched at the ultimate level however, there is a considerable degree of variation within a given species in the extent of cooperative behaviours exhibited. Possible factors that have been discussed to contribute to this variation are the social relationship between the cooperating individuals, but also non-social factors such as inhibitory control. Investigating the performance of wolves, a highly cooperative species, in three experimental cooperative tasks; a coordination (string-pulling) task, a prosocial task and an inequity aversion task, we found that the social relationship between the partners had the largest effects on all tasks, while non-social factors (inhibition, learning speed, causal understanding and persistence) had rather unpredicted, or no effects. The results support the potential importance of relational factors, rather than motivation and cognitive abilities, in driving cooperative interactions.
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Project description:To establish whether deficits in social cognition are present in children with generalized or focal epilepsy in mainstream education, and whether any relation exists between social cognition, communication, and behaviour measures.In a cross-sectional study, children with an epilepsy-only diagnoses in mainstream education (n=20 with generalized epilepsy; eight males, 12 females; mean age 11y 6mo, SD 2y 6mo; and n=27 with focal epilepsy; 12 males, 15 females; mean age 11y 8mo, SD 2y 2mo) and comparison participants (n=57; 28 males, 29 females; mean age 11y 2mo, SD 2y 4mo) were administered the Strange Stories task and the Mind in the Eyes task, as well as an IQ assessment. Parents completed the Children's Communication Checklist-2 and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL).Both groups of children with epilepsy performed more poorly than control children on the Mental Stories component of the Strange Stories task, F(2,101)=3.2, p<0.001. Performance on Mental Stories was related to pragmatic communication, but only in the generalized epilepsy group (r=0.51, p=0.03, 95% CI=0.2-0.8). There were no differences between epilepsy groups or control participants in the Mind in the Eyes task, F(2,101)=0.4, p=0.4.Children with 'epilepsy only' are at risk of deficits in social cognition and may require appropriate support.
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Project description:BackgroundAutistic individuals frequently experience social communication challenges. Girls are diagnosed with autism less often than boys even when their symptoms are equally severe, which may be due to insufficient understanding of the way autism manifests in girls. Differences in the behavioral presentation of autism, including how people talk about social topics, could contribute to these persistent problems with identification. Despite a growing body of research suggesting that autistic girls and boys present distinct symptom profiles in a variety of domains, including social attention, friendships, social motivation, and language, differences in the way that autistic boys and girls communicate verbally are not yet well understood. Closely analyzing boys' and girls' socially-focused language during semi-structured clinical assessments could shed light on potential sex differences in the behavioral presentation of autistic individuals that may prove useful for identifying and effectively supporting autistic girls. Here, we compare social word use in verbally fluent autistic girls and boys during the interview sections of the ADOS-2 Module 3 and measure associations with clinical phenotype.MethodsSchool-aged girls and boys with autism (N = 101, 25 females; aged 6-15) were matched on age, IQ, and parent/clinician ratings of autism symptom severity. Our primary analysis compared the number of social words produced by autistic boys and girls (normalized to account for differences in total word production). Social words are words that make reference to other people, including friends and family.ResultsThere was a significant main effect of sex on social word production, such that autistic girls used more social words than autistic boys. To identify the specific types of words driving this effect, additional subcategories of friend and family words were analyzed. There was a significant effect of sex on friend words, with girls using significantly more friend words than boys. However, there was no significant main effect of sex on family words, suggesting that sex differences in social word production may be driven by girls talking more about friends compared to boys, not family. To assess relationships between word use and clinical phenotype, we modeled ADOS-2 Social Affect (SA) scores as a function of social word production. In the overall sample, social word use correlated significantly with ADOS-2 SA scores, indicating that participants who used more social words were rated as less socially impaired by clinicians. However, when examined in each sex separately, this result only held for boys.LimitationsThis study cannot speak to the ways in which social word use may differ for younger children, adults, or individuals who are not verbally fluent; in addition, there were more autistic boys than girls in our sample, making it difficult to detect small effects.ConclusionsAutistic girls used significantly more social words than boys during a diagnostic assessment-despite being matched on age, IQ, and both parent- and clinician-rated autism symptom severity. Sex differences in linguistic markers of social phenotype in autism are especially important in light of the late or missed diagnoses that disproportionately affect autistic girls. Specifically, heightened talk about social topics could complicate autism referral and diagnosis when non-clinician observers expect a male-typical pattern of reduced social focus, which autistic girls may not always exhibit.
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Project description:Models of impaired social competence in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) highlight deficits in social cognition and social behavior. The Contextual Assessment of Social Skills (CASS) is a laboratory-based assessment of conversation ability in which participants interact with trained confederates who act interested (CASS-I) and bored (CASS-B), sequentially. The increased ecological validity of the CASS allows for better generalization to real-world social situations. Participants' perceptions of confederate behavior, assessed by the CASS Conversation Rating Scale (CRS), might offer additional utility as a metric of social cognition. The current study examined CASS confederate behavior (adherence to interested or bored condition) and both internal validity and convergent validity of the CASS as a measure of social behavior and social cognition. Fifty adolescents with ASD participated as part of a multisite randomized clinical trial. Adherence ratings were consistent across gender and site, with interested confederates significantly out-performing bored confederates. The ability to distinguish between interested and bored confederates was positively associated with CASS social behavior and social cognition tasks, although social behavior during the CASS was not consistently associated with parent-rated social behavior. Controlling for confederate behavior did not significantly alter these associations. Findings demonstrate strong internal validity of the CASS and, partially, external validity of the CASS as a measure of social cognition. Findings highlight nuanced differences in social behavior and social cognition. The CASS shows promise as an outcome measure for clinical interventions and should be incorporated into a multimethod battery to assess social competence in individuals with ASD. LAY SUMMARY: Social cognition and social behavior should be studied together to examine social competence in youth with autism. The Contextual Assessment of Social Skills (CASS), a behavioral observation measure, shows promise toward this end; findings suggest the CASS taps social cognition and social behavior when administered alongside a participant rating scale of their conversation partner's engagement. Continued research, including examination of the CASS, may inform best practices in comprehensive assessment of social competence in autism. Autism Res 2021, 14: 709-719. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.
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Project description:Alterations in social cognition (SC) are hypothesized to underlie social communication and interaction challenges in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The aetiological underpinnings driving this association remain unclear. We examined SC in 196 twins with ASD, other neurodevelopmental disorders or typical development using the naturalistic Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition. Autism and its severity were assessed with the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-2, and autistic traits with the Social Responsiveness Scale-2. Using within twin-pair regression models, controlling for age, sex, IQ, and unmeasured familial confounders such as genetic background and shared-environment, SC correlated with ASD diagnosis, autism severity, and autistic traits. Our findings highlight the importance of SC alterations in autism and suggest a non-shared environmental impact on the association.
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Project description:Schizophrenia and autism both feature significant impairments in social cognition and social functioning, but the specificity and mechanisms of these deficits remain unknown. Recent research suggests that social cognitive deficits in both disorders may arise from dysfunctions in the neural systems that underlie social cognition. We explored the neural activation of discrete brain regions implicated in social cognitive and face processing in schizophrenia subgroups and autism spectrum disorders during complex social judgments of faces. Twelve individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), 12 paranoid individuals with schizophrenia (P-SCZ), 12 non-paranoid individuals with schizophrenia (NP-SCZ), and 12 non-clinical healthy controls participated in this cross sectional study. Neural activation, as indexed by blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast, was measured in a priori regions of interest while individuals rated faces for trustworthiness. All groups showed significant activation of a social cognitive network including the amygdala, fusiform face area (FFA), superior temporal sulcus (STS), and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) while completing a task of complex social cognition (i.e. trustworthiness judgments). ASD and P-SCZ individuals showed significantly reduced neural activation in the right amygdala, FFA, and left VLPFC as compared to controls and in the left VLPFC as compared to NP-SCZ individuals during this task. These findings lend support to models hypothesizing well-defined neural substrates of social cognition and suggest a specific neural mechanism that may underlie social cognitive impairments in both autism and paranoid schizophrenia.
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Project description:A key symptom of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is difficulty interacting socially with others. Social cognition problems in FTD include impaired emotion processing and theory of mind difficulties, and whilst these have been studied extensively in sporadic FTD, few studies have investigated them in familial FTD. Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) and Faux Pas (FP) recognition tests were used to study social cognition within the Genetic Frontotemporal Dementia Initiative (GENFI), a large familial FTD cohort of C9orf72, GRN, and MAPT mutation carriers. 627 participants undertook at least one of the tasks, and were separated into mutation-negative healthy controls, presymptomatic mutation carriers (split into early and late groups) and symptomatic mutation carriers. Groups were compared using a linear regression model with bootstrapping, adjusting for age, sex, education, and for the FP recognition test, language. Neural correlates of social cognition deficits were explored using a voxel-based morphometry (VBM) study. All three of the symptomatic genetic groups were impaired on both tasks with no significant difference between them. However, prior to onset, only the late presymptomatic C9orf72 mutation carriers on the FER test were impaired compared to the control group, with a subanalysis showing differences particularly in fear and sadness. The VBM analysis revealed that impaired social cognition was mainly associated with a left hemisphere predominant network of regions involving particularly the striatum, orbitofrontal cortex and insula, and to a lesser extent the inferomedial temporal lobe and other areas of the frontal lobe. In conclusion, theory of mind and emotion processing abilities are impaired in familial FTD, with early changes occurring prior to symptom onset in C9orf72 presymptomatic mutation carriers. Future work should investigate how performance changes over time, in order to gain a clearer insight into social cognitive impairment over the course of the disease.
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Project description:The current study evaluated three social cognition (SC) tests for their clinical utility in aiding autism diagnosis. To do so, we compared the performance of 86 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 68 typically developing (TD) children, all aged from 4 to 10 years old, on three SC tasks [the Social Information Processing Interview (SIPI), the Comic Strip Task (CST), and the children's version of the Eyes Task] and calculated threshold scores that best differentiated the two groups. While difficulties in these abilities appear to represent the "central core" of ASD, services have largely ignored SC tests when supporting autism diagnoses. Therefore, this study attempted to validate and evaluate the diagnostic potential of these three tasks for children with ASD. To investigate the accuracy of these SC tests, we used the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. As expected, the ASD group performed worse than the TD group on the SIPI and CST, but contrary to our prediction, the groups did not significantly differ on the Eyes Task. Specifically, the overall area under the curve (AUC) for the SIPI was 0.87, with a sensitivity of 73.5% and a specificity of 83.9% at the best cutoff point (score range 0-36; best cutoff = 31). The overall AUC for the CST was 0.75, with a sensitivity of 71.1% and a specificity of 77.0% at the best cutoff point (score range 0-15; best cutoff = 11). The overall AUC for the Eyes Task was 0.51, with a sensitivity of 50.3% and a specificity of 40.2% at the best cutoff point (score range 0-54; best cutoff = 45). In conclusion, the results showed that the SIPI test has good predictive power for classifying children with ASD. It should provide substantial supplementary clinical information and help to consolidate diagnostic procedures based on standard tools. Moreover, the results of the study have substantial implications for clinical practice: the better the knowledge of SC functioning in children with ASD, the more effective the intervention program for rehabilitation.
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Project description:BackgroundAutism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by aberrant neurodevelopment. Although the ASD brain undergoes precocious growth followed by decelerated maturation during early postnatal period of childhood, the neuroimaging approach has not been empirically applied to investigate how the ASD brain develops during adolescence.Methodology/principal findingsWe enrolled 25 male adolescents with high functioning ASD and 25 typically developing controls for voxel-based morphometric analysis of structural magnetic resonance image. Results indicate that there is an imbalance of regional gray matter volumes and concentrations along with no global brain enlargement in adolescents with high functioning ASD relative to controls. Notably, the right inferior parietal lobule, a role in social cognition, have a significant interaction of age by groups as indicated by absence of an age-related gain of regional gray matter volume and concentration for neurodevelopmental maturation during adolescence.Conclusions/significanceThe findings indicate the neural correlates of social cognition exhibits aberrant neurodevelopment during adolescence in ASD, which may cast some light on the brain growth dysregulation hypothesis. The period of abnormal brain growth during adolescence may be characteristic of ASD. Age effects must be taken into account while measures of structural neuroimaging have been clinically put forward as potential phenotypes for ASD.
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