Previous studies of face processing in autism suggest abnormalities in anatomical development, functioning and connectivity/coordination of distributed brain systems involved in social cognition, but the spatial sequence and time course of rapid (sub-second) neural responses to emotional facial expressions have not been examined in detail. Source analysis of high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) is an optimal means to examine both the precise temporal profile and spatial location of early electrical brain activity in response to emotionally salient stimuli. Therefore, we recorded 128-channel ERPs from high-functioning males with autism (aged 6-10 years), and age-, sex- and IQ-matched typically developing controls during explicit and implicit processing of emotion from pictures showing happy, angry, fearful, sad and neutral facial expressions. Children with autism showed normal patterns of behavioural and ERP (P1, N170 and P2) responses. However, dipole source analysis revealed that ERP responses relating to face detection (visual cortex) and configural processing of faces (fusiform gyrus), as well as mental state decoding (medial prefrontal lobe), were significantly weaker and/or slower in autism compared with controls during both explicit and implicit emotion-processing tasks. Slower- and larger-amplitude ERP source activity in the parietal somatosensory cortices possibly reflected more effortful compensatory analytical strategies used by the autism group to process facial gender and emotion. Such aberrant neurophysiological processing of facial emotion observed in children with autism within the first 300 ms of stimulus presentation suggests abnormal cortical specialization within social brain networks, which would likely disrupt the development of normal social-cognitive skills.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06328.x | DOI Listing |
Gels
November 2024
School of Pharmacy, College of Pharmacy, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung 807378, Taiwan.
This study presents the development of thiol-maleimide/thiol-thiol double self-crosslinking hyaluronic acid-based (HA) hydrogels for use as dermal fillers. Hyaluronic acid with varying degrees of maleimide substitution (10%, 20%, and 30%) was synthesized and characterized, and HA hydrogels were fabricated using two molecular weights of four-arm polyethylene glycol (PEG10K/20K)-thiol as crosslinkers. The six resulting HA hydrogels demonstrated solid-like behavior with distinct physical and rheological properties.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
December 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Almería, Almería, Spain.
The differential outcomes procedure (DOP) is an easily applicable method for enhancing discriminative learning and recognition memory. Its effectiveness in improving the recognition of facial expressions of emotion has been recently explored, with mixed success. This study aims to explore whether the expectancies generated via the DOP are reflected as differences in event-related potentials (ERPs) between participants in differential (DOP) or non-differential conditions (NOP) in a facial expression of complex emotion label task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Neuropsychol
December 2024
Department of Pathophysiology and Transplantation, University of Milan, Milan, Italy.
In recognising emotions expressed by others, one can make use of both embodied cognition and mechanisms that do not necessarily require activation of the limbic system, such as evoking from memory the meaning of morphological features of the observed face. Instead, we believe that the recognition of the authenticity of an emotional expression is primarily based on embodied cognition, for which the mirror system would play a significant role. To verify this hypothesis, we submitted 20 parkinsonian patients and 20 healthy control subjects to the Emotional Authenticity Recognition test, a novel test using dynamic stimuli to evaluate the ability to recognise emotions and their authenticity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMol Biotechnol
December 2024
Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Medical Sciences, Rawalpindi, 46000, Pakistan.
The development of genome technology has opened new possibilities for comparative primate genomics. Non-human primates share approximately 98% genome similarity and provides vital information into the genetic similarities and variances among species utilized as disease models. DNA study links unique genetic variations to common facial attributes such as nose and eyes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCureus
November 2024
Department of Community Medicine, Al-Rayan National College of Medicine, Madinah, SAU.
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