Rory Allen

`Hath charms to soothe . . .': An exploratory study of how high-functioning adults with ASD experience music

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 high-functioning adults on the autism spectrum, in order to examine the nature of their personal experiences of music. Consistent with the literature on typically developing peoples engagement with music, the analysis showed that most participants exploit music for a wide range of purposes in the cognitive, emotional and social domains, including mood management, personal development and social inclusion. However, in contrast to typically developing people, the ASD groups descriptions of mood states reflected a greater reliance on internally focused (arousal) rather than externally focused (emotive) language.

Do social and cognitive deficits curtail musical understanding? Evidence from autism and Down syndrome

Children with autism experience difficulties in understanding social affective cues, and it has been suggested that such deficits will generalize to music. In order to investigate this proposal, typically developing individuals and children with autism and Down syndrome were compared on tasks measuring perception of affective and movement states in music. The results showed that discrimination performance on both experimental conditions depended on chronological or verbal mental age rather than diagnosis. The findings suggest that emotion-processing deficits in the social domain do not generalize to music, and that musical understanding is closely related to the level of language development.

Measuring the effects of alexithymia on perception of emotional vocalizations in autistic spectrum disorder and typical development

BACKGROUND The results from recent studies suggest that alexithymia, a disorder characterized by impairments in understanding personal experiences of emotion, is frequently co-morbid with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the extent that alexithymia is associated with primary deficits in recognizing external emotional cues, characteristic in ASD, has yet to be determined. METHOD Twenty high-functioning adults with ASD and 20 age- and intelligence-matched typical controls categorized vocal and verbal expressions of emotion and completed an alexithymia assessment. RESULTS Emotion recognition scores in the ASD group were significantly poorer than in the control group and performance was influenced by the severity of alexithymia and the psycho-acoustic complexity of the presented stimuli. For controls, the effect of complexity was significantly smaller than for the ASD group, although the association between total emotion recognition scores and alexithymia was still strong. CONCLUSIONS Higher levels of alexithymia in the ASD group accounted for some, but not all, of the group difference in emotion recognition ability. However, alexithymia was insufficient to explain the different sensitivities of the two groups to the effects of psycho-acoustic complexity on performance. The results showing strong associations between emotion recognition and alexithymia scores in controls suggest a potential explanation for variability in emotion recognition in non-clinical populations.

The Effects of Autism and Alexithymia on Physiological and Verbal Responsiveness to Music.

It has been suggested that individuals with autism will be less responsive to the emotional content of music than typical individuals. With the aim of testing this hypothesis, a group of high-functioning adults on the autism spectrum was compared with a group of matched controls on two measures of emotional responsiveness to music, comprising physiological and verbal measures. Impairment in participants ability to verbalize their emotions (type-II alexithymia) was also assessed. The groups did not differ significantly on physiological responsiveness, but the autism group was significantly lower on the verbal measure. However, inclusion of the alexithymia score as a mediator variable nullified this group difference, suggesting that the difference was due not to absence of underlying emotional responsiveness to music in autism, but to a reduced ability to articulate it.

Anosognosia and neglect respond differently to the same treatments

Different techniques, such as optokinetic stimulation, adaptation to prismatic shift of the visual field to the right, or transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS), have been shown to alleviate neglect, at least temporarily. We assessed the effect of these techniques on anosognosia and whether their therapeutic effect, if any, matches that on neglect. The effect of the three types of treatment on anosognosia and neglect was investigated in five patients presenting with both severe anosognosia and neglect. Patient 1 was treatment responsive to anosognosia but not to neglect, whereas patients 4 and 5 showed the reverse pattern, i.e., they were treatment responsive to neglect but not to anosognosia. This “treatment response bias” proved to be a valid means to investigate different effects of treatments in the same patient.

The Subjective Experience of Music in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 12 high‐functioning adults on the autism spectrum in order to examine the nature of their personal experiences of music. The analysis showed that most participants exploit music for a wide range of purposes in the cognitive, emotional and social domains, but the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) groups descriptions of mood states reflected a greater reliance on internally focused (arousal) rather than externally focused (emotive) language, when compared with studies of typically developing individuals.

The same, only different: what can responses to music in autism tell us about the nature of musical emotions?

We propose addressing the theme of this special issue by examining the affective responses that music evokes in the individual. The logical first step is to enquire how far these responses resemble naturalistic emotions, i.e., those that are not specifically musical, but have ordinary non-musical content. The literature is ambivalent on this. Many authors suggest that whilst certain emotions are exclusive to music (Scherer and Zentner, 2008), there is considerable overlap between “musical” and “naturalistic” emotions (Zentner et al., 2008); others deny that musically induced emotions are naturalistic (Konecni, 2005, 2008), a view elaborated by the nineteenth century critic Eduard Hanslick (Hanslick, 1986; see also Kivy, 2001, 2009; Zangwill, 2004, 2007, 2011).

With Concord of Sweet Sounds

Questions about musics evolution and functions have long excited interest among scholars. More recent theoretical accounts have stressed the importance of musics social origins and functions. Autism and Williams syndrome, neurodevelopmental disorders supposedly characterized by contrasting social and musical phenotypes, have been invoked as evidence for these. However, empirical data on social skills and deficits in autism and Williams syndrome do not support the notion of contrasting social phenotypes: research findings suggest that the social deficits characteristic of both disorders may increase rather than reduce the importance of music. Current data do not allow for a direct comparison of musical phenotypes in autism and Williams syndrome, although it is noted that deficits in music cognition have been observed in Williams syndrome, but not in autism. In considering broader questions about musical understanding in neurodevelopmental disorders, we conclude that intellectual impairment is likely to result in qualitative differences between handicapped and typical listeners, but this does not appear to limit the extent to which individuals can derive benefits from the experience of listening to music.

Relationship between anosognosia and depression in aphasic patients

Depression and reduced awareness of illness (anosognosia) can be frequent complications following a brain lesion but the relationship between these two syndromes is still unclear. While some researchers suggested a protective function of anosognosia from depression, others deny a functional relationship. We investigated anosognosia and depression in a group of 30 left-brain-damaged patients using specialized methodology for aphasic patients. We observed that anosognosic patients showed levels of depression comparable to those of aware patients and that anosognosia was highly selective for specific deficits. Our findings suggest that reduced awareness for a deficit does not play a crucial role in mood disorder, whereas “simply” suffering for a deficit can per se increase the likelihood of depression. Moreover, whereas depressed and nondepressed patients did show a similar impairment on the nonverbal executive function test, almost all patients showed anosognosia associated with impairment on executive functions. Finally, depressed patients tend to deny or minimize their own mood disorder, confirming that anosognosia can also concern mood status and that self-rating measures for depression could be quite controversial.

Exact solutions to Bayesian and maximum likelihood problems in facial identification when population and error distributions are known

The reliability of traditional photogrammetric identification techniques using a small number of facial landmarks has recently come in for criticism. However, the transformation of parameters into a new face space in which the error distributions are orthogonal, yields a maximum likelihood solution to the problem of identifying a photographed face from a small, known, population which, in a simulated example, raises the success rate from 20% to 93%. A full transformation yielding simultaneously independent population and error distributions can be derived from raw population and error data using a straightforward computer procedure. Such a transformation facilitates computations for the situation where a single suspect is held in custody and the likelihood ratio of his being identical with a photograph is desired. It seems premature to condemn photogrammetry until the more efficient data-analysis approach outlined in this paper has been applied and tested.