Understanding of emotional experience in autism: insights from the personal accounts of high-functioning children with autism

In this study, the authors investigate emotional understanding in autism through a discourse analytic framework to provide a window into children's strategies for interpreting emotional versus nonemotional encounters and consider the implications for the mechanisms underlying emotional understanding in typical development. Accounts were analyzed for thematic content and discourse structure. Whereas high-functioning children with autism were able to discuss contextually appropriate accounts of simple emotions, their strategies for interpreting all types of emotional (but not nonemotional) experiences differed from those used by typically developing children. High-functioning children with autism were less inclined to organize their emotional accounts in personalized causal-explanatory frameworks and displayed a tendency to describe visually salient elements of experiences seldom observed among comparison children. Findings suggest that children with autism possess less coherent representations of emotional experiences and use alternative strategies for interpreting emotionally evocative encounters. Discussion focuses on the significance of these findings for informing the nature of emotional dysfunction in autism as well as implications for theories of emotional understanding in typical development.     

Syntactic frame and verb bias in aphasia: plausibility judgments of undergoer-subject sentences

This study investigates three factors that have been argued to define "canonical form" in sentence comprehension: Syntactic structure, semantic role, and frequency of usage. We first examine the claim that sentences containing unaccusative verbs present difficulties analogous to those of passive sentences. Using a plausibility judgment task, we show that a mixed group of aphasics performed significantly better on unaccusatives than on passives. We then turn to the observation that passives are generally harder than actives for aphasics. We show that this effect is modulated by lexical bias, i.e., the likelihood that a verb appears in a given syntactic structure: Passives of passive-bias verbs were significantly easier than passives of active-bias verbs. More generally, sentences whose structure matches the lexical bias of the main verb are significantly easier than sentences in which structure and lexical bias do not match. These findings suggest that "canonical form" reflects frequency and lexical biases.     

Stereotype susceptibility narrows the gender gap in imagined self-rotation performance

Three studies examined the impact of stereotype messages on men’s and women’s performance of a mental rotation task involving imagined self-rotations. Experiment 1 established baseline differences between men and women; women made 12% more errors than did men. Experiment 2 found that exposure to a positive stereotype message enhanced women’s performance in comparison with that of another group of women who received neutral information. In Experiment 3, men who were exposed to the same stereotype message emphasizing a female advantage made more errors than did male controls, and the magnitude of error was similar to that for women from Experiment 1. The results suggest that the gender gap in mental rotation performance is partially caused by experiential factors, particularly those induced by sociocultural stereotypes.     

Intrahippocampal muscimol shifts learning strategy in gonadally intact young adult female rats

Learning strategy preferences depend upon circulating estrogen levels, with enhanced hippocampus-sensitive place learning coinciding with elevated estrogen levels. The effects of estrogen on strategy may be mediated by fluctuations in GABAergic function, given that inhibitory tone in the hippocampus is low when estrogen is high. We investigated the effects on learning strategy of intrahippocampal injections of a GABA(A) agonist in gonadally intact female rats. On the day of training, rats received 0.3 microL intrahippocampal infusions of muscimol (0.26 nmol or 2.6 nmol) or saline 20 min prior to training on a T-maze in which place (hippocampus-sensitive) or response (striatum-sensitive) strategies offer effective solutions. Muscimol treatment increased the use of the response strategy in a dose-dependent manner without influencing learning speed, indicating that muscimol modulated strategy and not learning ability. Furthermore, the muscimol-related shift to response strategies varied across the estrous cycle. The results indicate that increasing inhibition in the hippocampus biases rats away from hippocampus-sensitive place learning strategies and toward hippocampus-insensitive response learning strategies without a learning deficit. Furthermore, rats at proestrus demonstrated the most dramatic shift in learning strategy following muscimol treatment compared with control conditions, while rats at estrus demonstrated the most complete bias toward response strategies. The enhanced use of hippocampus-sensitive strategies at proestrus likely results from reduced hippocampal inhibition.     

Number and language: how are they related?

Does the ability to develop numerical concepts depend on our ability to use language? We consider the role of the vocabulary of counting words in developing numerical concepts. We challenge the 'bootstrapping' theory which claims that children move from using something like an object-file - an attentional process for responding to small numerosities - to a truly arithmetic one as a result of their learning the counting words. We also question the interpretation of recent findings from Amazonian cultures that have very restricted number vocabularies. Our review of data and theory, along with neuroscientific evidence, imply that numerical concepts have an ontogenetic origin and a neural basis that are independent of language.     

Visual information about past,current and future properties of irregular target paths in isometric force tracking

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - In visual-motor tracking, information about past, current, and future properties of a target path can be available but, because they are typically...     

Teaching social play skills to adults and children with autism as an approach to building rapport

Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and no intellectual disabilities were taught to increase the social play skills of children with ASD as part of a vocational training program. Participants included 3 adults, aged 21 to 27 years, and 6 children with ASD. Probes conducted throughout the study evaluated whether play skills training affected a measure of rapport between the adult and child. Results demonstrated the effectiveness of behavioral skills training for teaching the adult participants the appropriate play skills. In addition, the children's social engagement increased. Finally, rapport probes showed that play skills training increased levels of proximity, our measure of rapport, between the adults and children.     

Self‐Efficacy Among Adults in Substance Abuse Treatment: The Role of Religious Coping

In substance abuse treatment, general self‐efficacy and religiousness are factors that may support positive outcomes. The authors surveyed clients receiving substance abuse treatment (N = 121) and found that religious coping predicted general self‐efficacy scores. Clinical implications are discussed.