Autistic traits and social anxiety predict differential performance on social cognitive tasks in typically developing young adults

Dickter, Cheryl L.; Burk, Joshua A.; Fleckenstein, Katarina; Kozikowski, Christine

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0195239

Cited by 22 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…Because we sought to examine the role of realistic ecologically valid stimuli (Wheatley et al, 2011) on behavioral reaction times and accuracy between two groups of combat veterans, we used an ethnically diverse set of color faces without masking (Liu et al, 2013; Dickter et al, 2018). Faces were used from four face sets: the Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set (ADFES) (Van Der Schalk et al, 2011), the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF) (Lundqvist et al, 1998), the Warsaw Set of Emotional Facial Expression Pictures (WSEFEP) (Olszanowski et al, 2015) and the Radboud Faces Database (RFD) (Langner et al, 2010).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Angry and Fearful Face Conflict Effects in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Ashley

Swick

2019

Front. Psychol.

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In the presence of threatening stimuli, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can manifest as hypervigilance for threat and disrupted attentional control. PTSD patients have shown exaggerated interference effects on tasks using trauma-related or threat stimuli. In studies of PTSD, faces with negative expressions are often used as threat stimuli, yet angry and fearful facial expressions may elicit different responses. The modified Eriksen flanker task, or the emotional face flanker, has been used to examine response interference. We compared 23 PTSD patients and 23 military controls on an emotional face flanker task using angry, fearful and neutral expressions. Participants identified the emotion of a central target face flanked by faces with either congruent or incongruent emotions. As expected, both groups showed slower reaction times (RTs) and decreased accuracy on emotional target faces, relative to neutral. Unexpectedly, both groups showed nearly identical interference effects on fearful and neutral target trials. However, post hoc testing suggested that PTSD patients showed faster RTs than controls on congruent angry faces (target and flanker faces both angry) relative to incongruent, although this finding should be interpreted with caution. This possible RT facilitation effect with angry, but not fearful faces, also correlated positively with self-report measures of PTSD symptoms. These results suggest that PTSD patients may be more vigilant for, or primed to respond to, the appearance of angry faces, relative to fearful, but further study is needed.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Angry and Fearful Face Conflict Effects in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Ashley

Swick

2019

Front. Psychol.

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“…Multiple studies have found that non-clinical individuals with higher AQ scores show impaired performance on different cognitive and behavioural tasks, with patterns resembling those of ASD patients. This includes global visual processing [9], reduced neural response to affective touch [10] or attention and emotion processing [11], as well as a preference for predictability [12]. With autistic-like traits being continuously distributed across the population, it is still unclear whether correlations with biological parameters such as in ASD patients are also present in non-clinical subjects to a lesser extent.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Associations of subclinical autistic-like traits with brain structural variation using diffusion tensor imaging and voxel-based morphometry

et al. 2021

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Previous case-control studies of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have identified altered brain structure such as altered frontal and temporal cortex volumes, or decreased fractional anisotropy (FA) within the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus in patients. It remains unclear whether subclinical autistic-like traits might also be related to variation in these brain structures. In this study, we analysed MRI data of 250 psychiatrically healthy subjects phenotyped for subclinical autistic-like traits using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). For data analysis, we used voxel-based morphometry of T1-MRIs (Computational Anatomy Toolbox (CAT12)) and Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS) for diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data. AQ attention switching subscale correlated negatively with FA values in the bilateral uncinate fasciculus as well as the bilateral inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus. Higher AQ attention switching subscale scores were associated with increased mean diffusivity (MD) and radial diffusivity (RD) values in the uncinate fasciculus, while axial diffusivity (AD) values within this tract show a negative correlation. AQ attention to detail subscale correlated positively with grey matter volume in the right pre-and postcentral gyrus. We demonstrate that individuals with higher levels of autism-spectrum-like features show decreased white matter integrity in tracts associated with higher-level visual processing and increased cortical volume in areas linked to movement sequencing and working memory. Our results resemble regional brain structure alterations found in individuals with ASD. This offers opportunities to further understand the aetiology and pathogenesis of the disorder and shows a subclinical continuum perspective.

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“…Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by an early onset of difficulties associated with decreased social communication, restrictive interests, and repetitive patterns of behavior [ 1 , 2 ]. Obvious social deficits include reduced interest in observing faces and difficulties in understanding facial expressions [ 3 , 4 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increased Accuracy of Emotion Recognition in Individuals with Autism-Like Traits after Five Days of Magnetic Stimulations

Xiao

et al. 2020

Neural Plasticity

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Individuals with autism-like traits (ALT) belong to a subclinical group with similar social deficits as autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Their main social deficits include atypical eye contact and difficulty in understanding facial expressions, both of which are associated with an abnormality of the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (rpSTS). It is still undetermined whether it is possible to improve the social function of ALT individuals through noninvasive neural modulation. To this end, we randomly assigned ALT individuals into the real (n=16) and sham (n=16) stimulation groups. All subjects received five consecutive days of intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) on the rpSTS. Eye tracking data and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired on the first and sixth days. The real group showed significant improvement in emotion recognition accuracy after iTBS, but the change was not significantly larger than that in the sham group. Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) between the rpSTS and the left cerebellum significantly decreased in the real group than the sham group after iTBS. At baseline, rsFC in the left cerebellum was negatively correlated with emotion recognition accuracy. Our findings indicated that iTBS of the rpSTS could improve emotion perception of ALT individuals by modulating associated neural networks. This stimulation protocol could be a vital therapeutic strategy for the treatment of ASD.

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Autistic traits and social anxiety predict differential performance on social cognitive tasks in typically developing young adults

Cited by 22 publications

References 70 publications

Angry and Fearful Face Conflict Effects in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Angry and Fearful Face Conflict Effects in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Associations of subclinical autistic-like traits with brain structural variation using diffusion tensor imaging and voxel-based morphometry

Increased Accuracy of Emotion Recognition in Individuals with Autism-Like Traits after Five Days of Magnetic Stimulations

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