Ausiological Differences In Emotional Processing In Individuals With Autistic Spectrum Disorder

1) explain why it is important to recognise that each individual on the autistic spectrum has their own individual abilities, needs, strengths, preferences and interests

From the study conducted by Ferri et al., there was a slight statistical significance between amygdala activation to neutral and fearful faces in regards to anxiety levels. On the contrary, they did not find a significant difference. This could be due to the girls being unable to predict the

Both the fusiform gyrus and the inferior temporal gyrus are used in recognizing emotions made by faces. They help figure out what people are thinking just by looking at facial reactions. In people who have autism, these parts of the brain do not function normally so they are often unresponsive to the emotion written on people’s

Using fMRI, the first task will measure initial activation of the amygdala (fear) and anterior cingulate cortex (empathy). All

Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001). The RMET is a 36 item task used to assess participants ability to infer the mental state of others or ToM. It consists of 36 images of the eye region displaying a wide range of positive, negative and complex expressions of emotions. Participants must select which of the four words presented best describes the emotion portrayed in the image. Higher scores indicate a greater capacity to understand the mental states of others. There is evidence for reliability and validity of the RMET as a measure of ToM (Baron-Cohen et al.,

Imaging studies in the past have reported that the region of the fusiform gyrus is more active during face recognition than object viewing, during face matching than location matching and during viewing normal faces other than scrambled faces or textures. This research was a great beginning, but it does not establish that this FFA is specifically involved in face recognition, as there is a range of alternative interpretations of what can activate our brains. These alternative interpretations include low-level feature extraction, visual attention that is greater in faces and recognition of basic items and recognition of human objects.

Over the past twenty years, researchers on Autism have made notable findings in comprehending prevalence rates and creating accurate assessments to gather current diagnostic criterion. A significant increase in the prevalence rate of ASD has led researchers to make further inquiries about the precision of the tests used to assist in the diagnosis of autism.

They receive information from the lower brain, which regulates arousal and screens incoming messages from within and outside of the body. The limbic system which is a group of related nervous system structures located in the midbrain and linked to emotions and feelings then sends the messages to the frontal lobes. Finally, the frontal lobes are suspected to be the site of working memory, the place where information about the immediate environment is considered for memory storage, planning, and future-directed behavior. Scientist believe the activity in the frontal lobes is depressed in people with ADD.

The Amygdala associates experiences and things in this world to emotional reactions that we have.

O’Toole and Haxby’s model did not account for the extent to which the various face selective regions in the human brain classify different facial expressions. Zhang et al., 2016 used fMRI to determine how well face selective brain regions are able to decode different categories of

Emotions run the world: many buy the “perfect dress” to feel confident, others run for fun, and others sleep as their sadness increases. Thus, in a world where emotions lead, mankind struggles to reason. Dr. Mark G. Baxter, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, and Dr. Elisabeth A. Murray, a Senior Investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health, are perfect examples of why many professionals in the science and medical field should start to investigate the amygdala, an “almond-shaped group of nuclein” associated with emotion, due to it being one of the most important parts of the brain as it is what defines what people do in their everyday basis. Nature, one of the most respected journals in the scientific community, published Dr. Baxter and Dr. Murray’s “The Amygdala and Reward” on July 2002 Nature Publishing Group arguing through ethos and logical appeals that the amygdala processes reward in the brain as well a negative emotions. Both neuroscientists prove the importance of understanding the connections between reward and emotions by analyzing their experiments performed on moneys and other primates, and including facts and statistics from other scientists and doctors. This well crafted article conscientiously analyzes how the amygdala’s role in stimulus-reward learning might be just as important as its role in processing negative fear and conditioning by providing credibility, reliability, logic, and reason to the audience.

In addition individuals with autism show deficits in understanding the emotional states of others which is seen in how they imitate and perceive facial expressions. Dapretto et al, (2006) studied MNS by investigating neural-activity during the imitation and observation of emotional facial expressions in high-functioning autistic children and found activity in the anterior component of the MNS was greater in controls then children with ASD. They found that typically developing children rely on right hemisphere mirror neuron mechanisms which is linked to the limbic system where meaning of the observed emotion is understood. Dapretto and colleagues suggested that since individuals with ASD displayed a dysfunction in their MNS they have to use alternate

The researcher tested 25 different participants in a penny-jar test while the participants were hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) to monitor their brain during the test. The fMRI showed a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that is connected to a person’s emotions.

Title: Evaluate experimental and brain-imaging techniques and consider what they tell us about the brain and cognitive behaviour in typical and atypical individuals.

Chapter 2 is centered on the early attempts to identify the brain’s components of emotions. Key researchers that are discussed are a Cornell neuroanatomist, James Papez, and aforementioned physician and neuroscientist Paul MacLean, who worked at Yale and the National Institutes of Mental Health. Together, this pair of researchers conducted seminal medial temporal lobe lesion experiments. The resulting idea was that the emotional brain is composed of a set of interconnected structures in the core of the brain. MacLean dubbed these structures as the “limbic system”. The function of the limbic system and it relationship to emotion was widely debated by many researchers.