Preserved action recognition in children with autism spectrum disorders: Evidence from an EEG and eye-tracking study.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulties recognizing and understanding others' actions. The goal of the present study was to determine whether children with and without ASD show differences in the way they process stimuli depicting Biological Motion (BM). Thirty-two children aged 7-16 (16 ASD and 16 typically developing (TD) controls) participated in two experiments.

Emotional expression in psychiatric conditions: New technology for clinicians.

Aim: Emotional expressions are one of the most widely studied topics in neuroscience, from both clinical and non-clinical perspectives. Atypical emotional expressions are seen in various psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, depression, and autism spectrum conditions. Understanding the basics of emotional expressions and recognition can be crucial for diagnostic and therapeutic procedures.

Effect of visual stimuli of pain on empathy brain network in people with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The extent to which affective empathy is impaired in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) remains unclear, as some-but not all-previous neuroimaging studies investigating empathy for pain in ASD have shown similar activation levels to those of neurotypicals individuals. These inconsistent results could be due to the use of different empathy-eliciting stimuli. While some studies used pictures of faces exhibiting a painful expression, others used pictures of limbs in painful situations.

The EU-Emotion Voice Database.

In this study, we report the validation results of the EU-Emotion Voice Database, an emotional voice database available for scientific use, containing a total of 2,159 validated emotional voice stimuli. The EU-Emotion voice stimuli consist of audio-recordings of 54 actors, each uttering sentences with the intention of conveying 20 different emotional states (plus neutral). The database is organized in three separate emotional voice stimulus sets in three different languages (British English, Swedish, and Hebrew).

Influence of anxiety and alexithymia on brain activations associated with the perception of others' pain in autism.

The circumstances under which empathy is altered in ASD remain unclear, as previous studies did not systematically find differences in brain activation between ASD and controls in empathy-eliciting paradigms, and did not always monitor whether differences were primarily due to ASD "per se", or to conditions overlapping with ASD, such as alexithymia and anxiety. Here, we collected fMRI data from 47 participants (22 ASD) viewing pictures depicting hands and feet of unknown others in painful, disgusting, or neutral situations. We computed brain activity for painful and disgusting stimuli (vs.