Autism, Emotional Processing, and the Amygdala

Yawei Cheng51 enrolled

Overview

Empathy imbalance hypothesis suggests that individuals with autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) should have a deficit of cognitive empathy and a surfeit of emotional empathy. Considering that inconsistent amygdala reactivity to emotional faces might be ascribed to aberrant attention in ASD, the investigators hypothesized to investigate if there would be an imbalance between conscious and nonconscious emotional processing. This fMRI study recruited 26 youths and young adults with autism spectrum disorder and 25 matched controls, and measured their amygdala reactivity and functional connectivity in response to conscious and nonconscious (backward masked) perception of threatening faces. Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder; amygdala reactivity; emotional processing; fMRI

Study Type

OBSERVATIONAL

Enrollment

Conditions

Autism Spectrum Disorder

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 13 YearsMax age: 40 YearsHealthy volunteers:

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: * Clinical diagnosis of severity of Autism-Spectrum Disorders * IQ \> 75 Exclusion Criteria: * Neurological abnormalities, * A history of epilepsy or seizures, head trauma a * IQ \<75

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Age

Age in years

Time frame: 1 minutes

Color identification task

During fMRI scanning, subjects watched emotional faces and performed the color identification task, in which they were asked to judge the color of each face (pseudo-colored in either red, yellow, or blue) and to indicate the answer by a keypad button press.

Time frame: 10 minutes

Detection task

Immediately after fMRI scanning, participants underwent the detection task, during which they were shown all of the stimuli again and alerted of the presence of fearful faces. The subjects were administered a forced-choice test under the same presentation conditions as those during scanning and asked to indicate whether they observed a fearful face or not.

Time frame: 10 minutes

fMRI response

Time frame: 10 minutes