The Treatment of Anxiety in Autism Spectrum Disorder (TAASD) Study: Rationale, Design and Methods.

This paper describes the rationale, design, and methods of the Treatment for Anxiety in Autism Spectrum Disorders study, a three-site randomized controlled trial investigating the relative efficacy of a modular CBT protocol for anxiety in ASD (Behavioral Interventions for Anxiety in Children with Autism) versus standard CBT for pediatric anxiety (the program) and a treatment-as-usual control. The trial is distinct in its scope, its direct comparison of active treatments for anxiety in ASD, and its comprehensive approach to assessing anxiety difficulties in youth with ASD. The trial will evaluate the relative benefits of CBT for children with ASD and investigate potential moderators (ASD severity, anxiety presentation, comorbidity) and mediators of treatment response, essential steps for future dissemination and implementation.

Individual differences in holistic processing predict the own-race advantage in recognition memory.

Individuals are consistently better at recognizing own-race faces compared to other-race faces (other-race effect, ORE). One popular hypothesis is that this recognition memory ORE is caused by differential own- and other-race holistic processing, the simultaneous integration of part and configural face information into a coherent whole. Holistic processing may create a more rich, detailed memory representation of own-race faces compared to other-race faces.

Holistic processing of the mouth but not the eyes in developmental prosopagnosia.

Because holistic processing is a hallmark of normal face recognition, we ask whether such processing is reduced in developmental prosopagnosia (DP), and, if so, what the sources are of this deficit. Existing literature provides a mixed picture, with face inversion effects showing consistent holistic processing deficits but unable to locate their source and with some composite face studies showing reduced holistic processing and some not. We addressed this issue more thoroughly with a very large sample of DPs (N = 38) performing the part-whole task, a well-accepted measure of holistic processing that allows for the separate evaluation of individual face parts.

Using regression to measure holistic face processing reveals a strong link with face recognition ability.

Although holistic processing is thought to underlie normal face recognition ability, widely discrepant reports have recently emerged about this link in an individual differences context. Progress in this domain may have been impeded by the widespread use of subtraction scores, which lack validity due to their contamination with control condition variance. Regressing, rather than subtracting, a control condition from a condition of interest corrects this validity problem by statistically removing all control condition variance, thereby producing a specific measure that is uncorrelated with the control measure.