Virtual delivery of group-based cognitive behavioral therapy for autistic children and youth during the COVID-19 pandemic was acceptable, feasible, and effective.

Anxiety challenges co-occur at a high rate in autistic children and youth (~ 50-79%), often with significant interference with daily functioning. Evidence-based interventions (e.g.

Neural Correlates of Reward Processing in Typical and Atypical Development.

Atypically developing children including those born preterm or who have autism spectrum disorder can display difficulties with evaluating rewarding stimuli, which may result from impaired maturation of reward and cognitive control brain regions. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, 58 typically and atypically developing children (6-12 years) participated in a set-shifting task that included the presentation of monetary reward stimuli. In typically developing children, reward stimuli were associated with age-related increases in activation in cognitive control centers, with weaker changes in reward regions.

Self-injurious behaviours are associated with alterations in the somatosensory system in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently engage in self-injurious behaviours, often in the absence of reporting pain. Previous research suggests that altered pain sensitivity and repeated exposure to noxious stimuli are associated with morphological changes in somatosensory and limbic cortices. Further evidence from postmortem studies with self-injurious adults has indicated alterations in the structure and organization of the temporal lobes; however, the effect of self-injurious behaviour on cortical development in children with ASD has not yet been determined.

White matter and development in children with an autism spectrum disorder.

Recent research suggests that brain development follows an abnormal trajectory in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The current study examined changes in diffusivity with age within defined white matter tracts in a group of typically developing children and a group of children with an ASD, aged 6 to 14 years. Age by group interactions were observed for frontal, long distant, interhemispheric and posterior tracts, for longitudinal, radial and mean diffusivity, but not for fractional anisotropy.

Risk factors associated with self-injurious behaviors in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.

While self-injurious behaviors (SIB) can cause significant morbidity for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), little is known about its associated risk factors. We assessed 7 factors that may influence self-injury in a large cohort of children with ASD: (a) atypical sensory processing; (b) impaired cognitive ability; (c) abnormal functional communication; (d) abnormal social functioning; (e) age; (f) the need for sameness; (g) rituals and compulsions. Half (52.

Regional differences in grey and white matter in children and adults with autism spectrum disorders: an activation likelihood estimate (ALE) meta-analysis.

Structural alterations in brain morphology have been inconsistently reported in children compared to adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We assessed these differences by performing meta-analysis on the data from 19 voxel-based morphometry studies. Common findings across the age groups were grey matter reduction in left putamen and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and grey matter increases in the lateral PFC, while white matter decreases were seen mainly in the children in frontostriatal pathways.

Measures of cortical grey matter structure and development in children with autism spectrum disorder.

The current study examined group differences in cortical volume, surface area, and thickness with age, in a group of typically developing children and a group of children with ASD aged 6-15 years. Results showed evidence of age by group interactions, suggesting atypicalities in the relation between these measures and age in the ASD group. Additional vertex-based analyses of cortical thickness revealed that specific regions in the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44) and left precuneus showed thicker cortex for the ASD group at younger ages only.

Visual search for schematic emotional faces risks perceptual confound.

Several studies have used a visual search task to demonstrate that schematic negative-face targets are found faster and/or more efficiently than positive ones, with these findings taken as evidence that negative emotional expression is capable of guiding attentional allocation in visual search. A common hypothesis is that these effects should be disrupted by face inversion; however, this has not been consistently demonstrated, and raises the possibility of a perceptual confound. One candidate confound is the feature of "closure" (see Wolfe & Horowitz, 2004) caused by the down-turned mouth adjacent to edge of the face.