Attentional bias toward negative and positive pictorial stimuli and its relationship with distorted cognitions, empathy, and moral reasoning among men with intellectual disabilities who have committed crimes.

The aims of this study were to examine: (a) whether men with intellectual disabilities who have a history of criminal offending attend to affective pictorial stimuli in a biased manner, and (b) whether there is a relationship between an affective attentional bias and offense-supportive cognitions, empathy, and moral reasoning. Forty-six men with intellectual disabilities who had a documented history of criminal offending, and 51 men who also had intellectual disabilities, but no such history, were recruited and asked to complete a computer-based dot-probe task using affective pictorial stimuli with randomization, along with measures of distorted cognitions, empathy, and moral reasoning. Those with a history of criminal offending endorsed significantly more offense-supportive cognitions, had significantly lower general empathy, and more "mature" moral reasoning, as well as a significant attentional bias toward affective pictorial stimuli.

Individual differences in brain structure underpin empathizing-systemizing cognitive styles in male adults.

Individual differences in cognitive style can be characterized along two dimensions: 'systemizing' (S, the drive to analyze or build 'rule-based' systems) and 'empathizing' (E, the drive to identify another's mental state and respond to this with an appropriate emotion). Discrepancies between these two dimensions in one direction (S>E) or the other (E>S) are associated with sex differences in cognition: on average more males show an S>E cognitive style, while on average more females show an E>S profile. The neurobiological basis of these different profiles remains unknown.

A behavioral comparison of male and female adults with high functioning autism spectrum conditions.

Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) affect more males than females in the general population. However, within ASC it is unclear if there are phenotypic sex differences. Testing for similarities and differences between the sexes is important not only for clinical assessment but also has implications for theories of typical sex differences and of autism.

A shift to randomness of brain oscillations in people with autism.

Background: Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) enables investigation of the intrinsic functional organization of the brain. Fractal parameters such as the Hurst exponent, H, describe the complexity of endogenous low-frequency fMRI time series on a continuum from random (H = .5) to ordered (H = 1).

Atypical neural self-representation in autism.

The 'self' is a complex multidimensional construct deeply embedded and in many ways defined by our relations with the social world. Individuals with autism are impaired in both self-referential and other-referential social cognitive processing. Atypical neural representation of the self may be a key to understanding the nature of such impairments.

Shared neural circuits for mentalizing about the self and others.

Although many examples exist for shared neural representations of self and other, it is unknown how such shared representations interact with the rest of the brain. Furthermore, do high-level inference-based shared mentalizing representations interact with lower level embodied/simulation-based shared representations? We used functional neuroimaging (fMRI) and a functional connectivity approach to assess these questions during high-level inference-based mentalizing. Shared mentalizing representations in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus, and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) all exhibited identical functional connectivity patterns during mentalizing of both self and other.