Ofer Golan

Systemizing empathy: Teaching adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism to recognize complex emotions using interactive multimedia

This study evaluated Mind Reading, an interactive systematic guide to emotions, for its effectiveness in teaching adults with Asperger syndrome (AS) and high-functioning autism (HFA) to recognize complex emotions in faces and voices. Experiment 1 tested a group of adults diagnosed with AS/HFA (n = 19) who used the software at home for 10-15 weeks. Participants were tested on recognition of faces and voices at three different levels of generalization. A matched control group of adults with AS/HFA (n = 22) were assessed without any intervention. In addition, a third group of general population controls (n = 24) was tested. Experiment 2 repeated the design of Experiment 1 with a group of adults with AS/HFA who used the software at home and met in a group with a tutor on a weekly basis. They were matched to a control group of adults with AS/HFA attending social skills training and to a general population control group (n = 13 for all three groups). In both experiments the intervention group improved significantly more than the control group on close, but not distant, generalization tasks. Verbal IQ had significant effects in Experiment 2. Using Mind Reading for a relatively short period of time allows users to learn to recognize a variety of complex emotions and mental states. However, additional methods are required to enhance generalization.

The ''Reading the Mind in Films'' Task: Complex emotion recognition in adults with and without autism spectrum conditions

Abstract Background: Individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have difficulties recognizing mental states in others. Most research has focused on recognition of basic emotions from faces and voices separately. This study reports the results of a new task, assessing recognition of complex emotions and mental states from social scenes taken from feature films. The film format arguably is more challenging and ecologically closer to real social situations. Sample and method: A group of adults with ASC (n=22) were compared to a group of matched controls from the general population (n=22). Participants were tested individually. Results: Overall, individuals with ASC performed significantly lower than controls. There was a positive correlation between verbal IQ and task scores. Using task scores, more than 90% of the participants were correctly allocated to their group. Item analysis showed that the errors individuals with ASC make when judging socioemotional information are subtle. Conclusions: This new test of complex emotion and mental state recognition reveals that adults with ASC have residual difficulties in this aspect of empathy. The use of language-based compensatory strategies for emotion recognition is discussed.

Using Assistive Technology to Teach Emotion Recognition to Students With Asperger Syndrome A Pilot Study

Many individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have difficulty recognizing emotions in themselves and others. The present pilot study explored the use of assistive technology to teach emotion recognition (ER) to eight children with ASC. Participants were between the ages of 8 and 11 years and had a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (AS). ER testing was conducted using a computer at pre- and postintervention. The intervention consisted of 10 weeks of using the computer software Mind Reading: The Interactive Guide to Emotions™ in either home or school settings. The results indicated that after intervention, participants improved on face and voice ER for basic and complex emotions that were in the software, as well as for complex voice ER for emotions not included in Mind Reading. The implications of these findings are discussed.

What can innovative technologies do for Autism Spectrum Disorders

Technology deals with human usage and knowledge of instruments and techniques to help people control and adapt to their natural environments. The usage of technology is taking an increasingly prominent role in research and clinical practice related to Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). At the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR), where the idea for this Special Issue on Autism and Technology was born, the number of accepted technology presentations increased from eight in 2004 to 36 in 2008. In 2009, a session dedicated solely to autism and technology was held at IMFAR where over 30 presenters from around the world demonstrated their work. Autism Speaks, one of the largest autism research funders internationally, continues to support an Innovative Technology for Autism Initiative1 began by Cure Autism Now to enhance and accelerate the pace of autism research and treatment by promoting collaborations among technologists, designers, engineers, and various stakeholders in the ASD community. Technological advances can potentially lead to novel and more effective treatment strategies and enhance quality of life for people with ASD and their families. A non-exhaustive list of examples includes the use of the Internet, online communities, robotics, assistive and prompting devices, computer-aided instruction, interactive metronomes, video modelling, video/DVD instruction, virtual reality, voice output communication devices, bio-sensing, telecommunication, computer-training (affect, social cognition, language), and computer-play (Goodwin, 2008). Articles selected for this Special Issue reflect some of the diversity and innovation involved in developing technologies for persons with ASD. Computer technology and the Internet are already beginning to change the lives of many people with ASD. Computers can help compensate for verbal and interaction problems and facilitate exchanges between people

Parent-child interaction and oxytocin production in pre-schoolers with autism spectrum disorder

BACKGROUND Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with genetic risk on the oxytocin system, suggesting oxytocin involvement in ASD; yet oxytocin functioning in young children with ASD is unknown. AIMS To assess baseline oxytocin in pre-schoolers with ASD and test whether oxytocin production may be enhanced by parent-child contact. METHOD Forty pre-schoolers with high-functioning ASD were matched with 40 typically developing controls. Two home visits included an identical 45-minute social battery once with the mother and once with the father. Four saliva oxytocin samples were collected from each parent and the child during each visit. RESULTS Children with ASD had lower baseline oxytocin. Following 20 min of parent-child interactions, oxytocin normalised and remained high during social contact. Fifteen minutes after contact, oxytocin fell to baseline. Oxytocin correlated with parent-child social synchrony in both groups. CONCLUSIONS Oxytocin dysfunction in ASD is observed in early childhood. The quick improvement in oxytocin production following parent-child contact underscores the malleability of the system and charts future directions for attachment-based behavioural and pharmacological interventions.

The Cambridge Mindreading Face-Voice Battery for Children (CAM-C): complex emotion recognition in children with and without autism spectrum conditions

BackgroundDifficulties in recognizing emotions and mental states are central characteristics of autism spectrum conditions (ASC). However, emotion recognition (ER) studies have focused mostly on recognition of the six ‘basic’ emotions, usually using still pictures of faces.MethodsThis study describes a new battery of tasks for testing recognition of nine complex emotions and mental states from video clips of faces and from voice recordings taken from the Mindreading DVD. This battery (the Cambridge Mindreading Face-Voice Battery for Children or CAM-C) was given to 30 high-functioning children with ASC, aged 8 to 11, and to 25 matched controls.ResultsThe ASC group scored significantly lower than controls on complex ER from faces and voices. In particular, participants with ASC had difficulty with six out of nine complex emotions. Age was positively correlated with all task scores, and verbal IQ was correlated with scores in the voice task. CAM-C scores were negatively correlated with parent-reported level of autism spectrum symptoms.ConclusionsChildren with ASC show deficits in recognition of complex emotions and mental states from both facial and vocal expressions. The CAM-C may be a useful test for endophenotypic studies of ASC and is one of the first to use dynamic stimuli as an assay to reveal the ER profile in ASC. It complements the adult version of the CAM Face-Voice Battery, thus providing opportunities for developmental assessment of social cognition in autism.

Emotion word comprehension from 4 to 16 years old: a developmental survey.

Background: Whilst previous studies have examined comprehension of the emotional lexicon at different ages in typically developing children, no survey has been conducted looking at this across different ages from childhood to adolescence. Purpose: To report how the emotion lexicon grows with age. Method: Comprehension of 336 emotion words was tested in n = 377 children and adolescents, aged 4–16 years old, divided into 6 age-bands. Parents or teachers of children under 12, or adolescents themselves, were asked to indicate which words they knew the meaning of. Results: Between 4 and 11 years old, the size of the emotional lexicon doubled every 2 years, but between 12 and 16 years old, developmental rate of growth of the emotional lexicon leveled off. This survey also allows emotion words to be ordered in terms of difficulty. Conclusions: Studies using emotion terms in English need to be developmentally sensitive, since during childhood there is considerable change. The absence of change after adolescence may be an artifact of the words included in this study. This normative developmental data-set for emotion vocabulary comprehension may be useful when testing for delays in this ability, as might arise for environmental or neurodevelopmental reasons.

Prosody recognition in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders: from psychoacoustics to cognition.

Prosody is an important tool of human communication, carrying both affective and pragmatic messages in speech. Prosody recognition relies on processing of acoustic cues, such as the fundamental frequency of the voice signal, and their interpretation according to acquired socioemotional scripts. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficiencies in affective prosody recognition. These deficiencies have been mostly associated with general difficulties in emotion recognition. The current study explored an additional association between affective prosody recognition in ASD and auditory perceptual abilities. Twenty high‐functioning male adults with ASD and 32 typically developing male adults, matched on age and verbal abilities undertook a battery of auditory tasks. These included affective and pragmatic prosody recognition tasks, two psychoacoustic tasks (pitch direction recognition and pitch discrimination), and a facial emotion recognition task, representing nonvocal emotion recognition. Compared with controls, the ASD group demonstrated poorer performance on both vocal and facial emotion recognition, but not on pragmatic prosody recognition or on any of the psychoacoustic tasks. Both groups showed strong associations between psychoacoustic abilities and prosody recognition, both affective and pragmatic, although these were more pronounced in the ASD group. Facial emotion recognition predicted vocal emotion recognition in the ASD group only. These findings suggest that auditory perceptual abilities, alongside general emotion recognition abilities, play a significant role in affective prosody recognition in ASD. Autism Res 2015, 8: 153–163.

The EU-Emotion Stimulus Set: A validation study.

The EU-Emotion Stimulus Set is a newly developed collection of dynamic multimodal emotion and mental state representations. A total of 20 emotions and mental states are represented through facial expressions, vocal expressions, body gestures and contextual social scenes. This emotion set is portrayed by a multi-ethnic group of child and adult actors. Here we present the validation results, as well as participant ratings of the emotional valence, arousal and intensity of the visual stimuli from this emotion stimulus set. The EU-Emotion Stimulus Set is available for use by the scientific community and the validation data are provided as a supplement available for download.

Neuroendocrine and behavioral response to social rupture and repair in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders interacting with mother and father

BackgroundPreschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit difficulties in handling social stress and utilizing efficient emotion regulation (ER) strategies to manage high arousal. While researchers called to assess ER in ASD, few studies utilized direct observations. We tested children’s behavioral and cortisol response to maternal and paternal unavailability and hypothesized that children with ASD will employ less complex ER strategies and their parents would show increased regulation facilitation effort to accommodate their child’s difficulties.MethodsForty preschoolers with ASD were matched with 40 typically developing (TD) preschoolers. Children were seen twice for identical battery with mother or father in the face-to-face-still-face paradigm, a three-episode paradigm where parent-child play (free play (FP)) is interrupted by elimination of communication (still face (SF)) followed by resuming play (reunion (RE)). Micro-coding of parent and child’s social behavior and ER strategies was conducted. Parent and child’s cortisol was assessed at baseline, following stress, and at recovery.ResultsChildren with ASD exhibited the typical SF effect, indexed by an increase in negative affect and decrease in positive communications, but employed more simple regulatory behavior (self-soothing, proximity-seeking) and less complex strategies involving attention redirection and substitutive play. Their parents used more regulation-facilitation behavior, both simple and complex. All children showed initial cortisol response to novelty, which declined over time. However, maternal presence suppressed initial cortisol response in children with ASD.ConclusionsChildren with ASD form typical expectations of parental availability and their parents increase effort to help repair social rupture. Among children with ASD, maternal presence and regulation facilitation provide social buffering for the child’s HPA stress response in a manner similar to mammalian neonates. Results highlight the importance of assessing ER by combining direct observations and physiological measures and including fathers in empirical studies and intervention efforts for children with ASD during sensitive periods for social growth.