Vicarious Fear Learning: The Role of Empathy

Fear learning can take place indirectly, by observing others, as well as directly through personal experience. This study aimed to determine whether we could detect indirect – sometimes called vicarious – fear learning in the laboratory, and to examine the influence of trait empathy on the robustness of this learning experience. Deficient empathy features prominently in certain externalizing psychopathologies, and fear learning is theoretically implicated in many psychological disorders, but little research has examined the possible connection between the two. In the present study, we first showed participants (N = 80; Mage = 19.1 years, SD = 2.1; 62.5% white) a video of a stranger (called the demonstrator) undergoing a Pavlovian fear conditioning procedure, receiving shocks and loud noises in the context of one of two conditioned stimuli. Next, we presented participants with those same conditioned stimuli. Correlation analyses showed an association between participants’ autonomic nervous system reactivity while observing the demonstrator receive aversive stimuli and their own reactivity when presented with the same conditioned stimulus associated with shock in the video. Associations between trait empathy (measured with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index and the Affective and Cognitive Measure of Empathy) and the strength of vicarious fear learning were generally small. Our results suggest the independence of the emotional response and trait empathy during the observation of someone’s distress

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf: a prospective paradigm to test Rachman's indirect pathways in children

Rachman's theory [The conditioning theory of fear insition: a critical examination. Behav. Res. Ther. 15 (1977) 375–387] of fear acquisition suggests that fears and phobias can be acquired through three pathways: direct conditioning, vicarious learning and information/instruction. Although retrospective studies have provided some evidence for these pathways in the development of phobias during childhood [see King, Gullone, & Ollendick, Etiology of childhood phobias: current status of Rachman's three pathway's theory. Behav. Res. Ther. 36 (1998) 297–309 for a review], these studies have relied on long-term past memories of adult phobics or their parents. The current study was aimed towards developing a paradigm in which the plausibility of Rachman's indirect pathways could be investigated prospectively. In Experiment 1, children aged between 7 and 9 were presented with two types of information about novel stimuli (two monsters): video information and verbal information in the form of a story. Fear-related beliefs about the monsters changed significantly as a result of verbal information but not video information. Having established an operational paradigm, Experiment 2 looked at whether the source of verbal information had an effect on changes in fear-beliefs. Using the same paradigm, information about the monsters was provided by either a teacher, an adult stranger or a peer, or no information was given. Again, verbal information significantly changed fear-beliefs, but only when the information came from an adult. The role of information in the acquisition of fear and maintenance of avoidant behaviour is discussed with reference to modern conditioning theories of fear acquisition

Investigating autistic traits, sensory experiences and personality: a mixed methods approach

The relatively recent spectrum view of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) with symptoms potentially varying from mild to severe, in combination with high rates of co-morbid conditions, has raised the issue of heterogeneity among individuals with ASD. This has consequent challenges for obtaining consistent research findings and for the diagnosis of those with less severe symptoms or high-functioning ASD. Since evidence has suggested the presence of non-clinical levels of autistic traits within the general population, this thesis aimed to explore these traits in relation to personality and sensory experiences via a mixed methods design, comprising two parts. Part I consisted of two studies aimed at exploring the lived experiences of individuals with ASD and their caregivers, in relation to sensory experiences, in order to inform the subsequent studies. The focus of Part II was to explore autistic traits in the broader population and consisted of three studies. In Part I, Study one comprised a systematic review of studies containing qualitative data from caregivers of individuals with ASD in relation to sensory experiences. Key sensory challenges reported related to: single senses (most commonly touch, taste, movement, and hearing), sensory issues embedded in certain situations, understanding the individual's sensory experiences, strategies to manage sensory issues, and the impacts of an individual’s sensory issues on the family. A discrepancy between caregiver reports of the benefits of sensory based interventions and existing empirical evidence was identified. Study two involved qualitative analyses of sensory experiences, as described by three individuals with a diagnosis of ASD. Three main themes were identified: dominant types of sensory experiences including visual experiences, sounds, tastes and food preferences, tactile experiences, and less dominant senses including smells and movement, and multi-sensory experiences; management of sensory challenges; and participants’ perceptions of change and difference. The first study of Part II, study three, investigated the psychometric properties of the short form of the Autism Quotient (AQ-10) based on two separate non-clinical samples (N1 = 194; N2 = 310), via exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Results indicated a 7-item 3-factor solution for the AQ-10, with factors labelled social cues, intentions, and multi-tasking. Since the social cues factor accounted for the largest amount of variance (31%), and other factors together accounted for minimal explained variance (27%), only items comprising social cues were selected as a measure of autistic traits for subsequent analysis and studies. Structural equation modelling was conducted to analyse co-variate paths between social cues and selected personality traits, with findings indicating that social cue reading was not related to trait anger, introversion, or collecting. These results, therefore, challenged stereotypical associations between these constructs and ASD, and were consistent with existing evidence that social aspects of autistic traits are independent from repetitive behaviours, such as collecting. Study four extended these findings through exploration of social cue reading in relation to trait flexibility, anxiety, and sensory experiences. Consistent findings indicated positive associations between inflexibility, anxiety, and auditory and visual hypersensitivity, potentially suggesting that individuals with higher trait inflexibility and anxiety could experience greater sensory sensitivity or vice versa. Finally, study five involved a qualitative analysis of accounts of sensory experiences from a large combined sample (N = 504) of individuals from the general population. Content analysis of responses resulted in six main categories. Similar percentages of individuals scoring low and high on autistic traits (based on social cue reading difficulty) reported challenges relating to single senses (visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory), people and crowds, and unexpected or unfamiliar stimuli. Unexpectedly, more individuals with low levels of autistic traits reported specific fears and anxiety responses to sensory stimuli, raising questions as to whether those with poorer social cue reading ability are more prone to report generalised anxiety (in line with trait anxiety) or are less aware or avoid reporting responses to sensory stimuli. Overall, the role of trait flexibility is highlighted across Parts I and II as being a central feature in individuals reporting experiences of sensory sensitivities. The collective findings of this program of research have implications for the further development of both clinical interventions and theoretical understandings, in addition to accommodations for individuals with sensory sensitivities and ASD traits. Keywords: autism, autistic traits, ASD, social cues, sensory, inflexibility, trait anger, trait anxiety, collecting interests

Neural Correlates of Approach and Avoidance Learning in Behavioral Inhibition

Behavioral inhibition is a temperamental trait characterized in infancy and early childhood by a tendency to withdraw from novel or familiar stimuli. Recent neuroimaging research indicates that BI individuals have atypical neural responses to information regarding reward and punishment in the striatum and amygdala--regions of the brain that receive information about salient stimuli and use it to guide motivated behavior. Activation to rewarding and punishing stimuli in these regions follows a "prediction error" pattern. My research examines whether behaviorally inhibited young adults display atypical prediction error responses, and whether these responses are specific to rewarding or aversive events. Prediction error signals are theorized to be critical for approach and avoidance learning, and a second study examined probabilistic approach and avoidance learning in the same sample, examining differences in approach and avoidance learning between behaviorally inhibited and non-inhibited individuals, and the relation between learning and neural prediction error signals to reward and punishment

Atypical neural responses to vocal anger in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Background Deficits in facial emotion processing, reported in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), have been linked to both early perceptual and later attentional components of event-related potentials (ERPs). However, the neural underpinnings of vocal emotion processing deficits in ADHD have yet to be characterised. Here, we report the first ERP study of vocal affective prosody processing in ADHD. Methods Event-related potentials of 6–11-year-old children with ADHD (n = 25) and typically developing controls (n = 25) were recorded as they completed a task measuring recognition of vocal prosodic stimuli (angry, happy and neutral). Audiometric assessments were conducted to screen for hearing impairments. Results Children with ADHD were less accurate than controls at recognising vocal anger. Relative to controls, they displayed enhanced N100 and attenuated P300 components to vocal anger. The P300 effect was reduced, but remained significant, after controlling for N100 effects by rebaselining. Only the N100 effect was significant when children with ADHD and comorbid conduct disorder (n = 10) were excluded. Conclusion This study provides the first evidence linking ADHD to atypical neural activity during the early perceptual stages of vocal anger processing. These effects may reflect preattentive hyper-vigilance to vocal anger in ADHD

The relationship between sensory sensitivity and autistic traits in the general population.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) tend to have sensory processing difficulties (Baranek et al. in J Child Psychol Psychiatry 47:591–601, 2006). These difficulties include over- and under-responsiveness to sensory stimuli, and problems modulating sensory input (Ben-Sasson et al. in J Autism Dev Disorders 39:1–11, 2009). As those with ASD exist at the extreme end of a continuum of autistic traits that is also evident in the general population, we investigated the link between ASD and sensory sensitivity in the general population by administering two questionnaires online to 212 adult participants. Results showed a highly significant positive correlation (r = .775, p < .001) between number of autistic traits and the frequency of sensory processing problems. These data suggest a strong link between sensory processing and autistic traits in the general population, which in turn potentially implicates sensory processing problems in social interaction difficulties

Exploring the Link Between Sensitive Temperament and Depression: The Roles of Parenting Environment and Empathic Personal Distress

abstract: This study investigated the relation between Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) temperament and depression, and whether such a relation might be further influenced by the indirect effects of parenting environment and empathic personal distress. A moderated mediation model was proposed to explain the underlying relations among SPS, depression, parenting environment and empathic personal distress. That is, greater levels of SPS temperament might predict higher levels of empathic personal distress, which then leads to increasing likelihood of experiencing depression. Moreover, it was predicted that this mediation relation might be significantly stronger under a less positive parenting context. The present study recruited 661 participants from a U.S. university and implemented questionnaires in an online survey. There was a significant main effect of SPS temperament in predicting empathic personal distress and depression, such that the more sensitive individuals reported higher empathic personal distress and depression. There also was a significant main effect of parenting environment on depression, where more positive parenting was associated with less depression. Empathic personal distress was found to partially mediate the relation between SPS and depression. That is, the association between SPS and depression could be partially explained by empathic personal distress. However, parenting environment did not moderate the main effect of SPS temperament on depression, the main effect of SPS on empathic personal distress, or the mediation model.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Psychology 201

Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Learning and Decision-Making in Adolescent-OCD: A Computational Approach

Early-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is substantially less researched than adult-OCD, resulting in prevalent equivocation surrounding the neurocognitive profile of child-OCD. Research into this area is pivotal as population studies report that youths with OCD struggle significantly in academic settings. In the General Introduction of this thesis, I reviewed existing literature and found that strikingly, young patients do not show impairment on features that are considered both hallmarks of adult OCD and tightly linked to disorder symptomatology, such as response inhibition and cognitive flexibility. Among the characteristics that are thought to be present in children and adolescents with OCD are abnormal decision-making under uncertainty and impaired learning, and I decided to focus on these features as they may be driving poor academic attainment in young people with the disorder. In addition, I sought to investigate other cognitive processes that have not been well-researched in adolescent-OCD but are found to be robustly altered in adult OCD such as goal directed/model-based reasoning, meta-cognition, and feedback sensitivity. I aimed to delineate these various processes using a battery of suitably complex cognitive tasks. Moreover, I highlighted that majority of past studies fail to find differences between young patients and controls due to behavioural signatures being too subtle to be uncovered by standard statistical analyses. Hence, I employed computational modelling of cognitive task data to disentangle latent decision-making processes displayed by adolescents with OCD. In Chapter 2, I modelled data from the Wisconsin Card Sorting task, a frequently used paradigm of cognitive flexibility, and confirmed that youths with OCD show equivalent performance on the task to controls. Only patients on serotonergic medication showed increased response latencies and a tendency to make unique errors (choosing a deck associated with no rule present on the test card). Next, in Chapter 3, I sought to understand instrumental and Pavlovian learning, and whether adolescents with OCD show increased punishment sensitivity on a novel aversive Pavlovian-to Instrumental Transfer paradigm. Once again, patient performance was equivalent to that of controls. Hence, the remaining chapters were dedicated to probing behaviour on probabilistic paradigms. In Chapter 4, I formally investigated model-based and model-free learning using a well-validated two step decision-making task, and fit a reinforcement learning drift diffusion model to both choice and reaction time data. Patients showed increased exploration on the task as well as faster and more erratic decisions compared to controls. Nonetheless, model-based learning was equivalent between groups. In the penultimate chapter, I demonstrate on a predictive-inference task that patients with OCD update their choices more frequently compared to controls independent of prediction error magnitude. Finally, in Chapter 6, I administered a probabilistic reversal learning paradigm to a large sample of 50 adolescent patients and 53 matched controls. Standard analyses revealed a significant reversal learning deficit in patients with OCD, wherein they displayed more errors and a lower propensity to repeat choices following positive feedback during the post-reversal phase. Crucially, computational modelling revealed striking group differences where adolescents with OCD displayed elevated reward learning and lower punishment learning, increased exploration, and decreased perseveration compared to controls. In the General Discussion, I emphasise that atypical learning and decision-making in adolescent-OCD are more pronounced on probabilistic tasks, where task environments are more volatile. Results are partly discussed in the context of the uncertainty model of OCD, where subjective feelings of doubt experienced by patients drive compulsive behaviours such as checking and certainty-seeking in daily life, alongside excessive exploration on probabilistic tasks. I also consider various explanations for cognitive distinctions between adult- and adolescent OCD. More general implications of the findings are discussed for understanding OCD in the context of adolescent development and for treatment/support strategies.WELLCOME TRUST (104631/Z/14/Z

Lydangst og frykt for fyrverkeri hos hund : en studie av genetiske og fenotypiske variabler

Noise reactivity is one of the most common behavioral problems in dogs. Even though various studies find significant differences in prevalence between breeds, and some also find gender differences, noise reactivity seems to occur in all types of dogs. Dogs may react to everyday noises such as clattering from kitchen utensils or vacuum cleaners, roaring traffic, and construction work, but also weather phenomena such as thunder and wind, or the noise of fireworks and gunshots. Owners often state that it is the sharp, sudden noises that dogs react to, and fear of fireworks, in particular, is a well-known and frequently discussed topic among dog owners. Fear of loud noises and fireworks are probably influenced both by complex genetics and environmental factors. This thesis deals with the genetic background of fear of fireworks and noise reactivity in dogs, with a particular focus on the standard poodle breed. A series of surveys have been carried out where dog owners have classified the level of noise reactivity in their dogs. Two questionnaires were aimed at owners of standard poodles or Irish soft-coated wheaten terriers, while the others were aimed at only owners of standard poodles. One epidemiological study, one pedigree-based heritability study, and one heritability study based on genetic association have been carried out. The surveys show that 49.4% of standard poodles and 53.6% of Irish soft-coated wheaten terriers display weak to extremely strong fear of fireworks and/or loud noises. It was also found that the dogs with a stronger degree of fear showed more and stronger fear-related behaviors. The two breeds also express a somewhat different frequency of fear-related behaviors when they experience a noise-related fearful situation. Repeated evaluations of many dogs show that owners are consistent in their assessment of the noise reactivity of their dogs and that there is a correlation between noise reactivity and the number of displayed fear behaviors. It was found that Irish soft-coated wheaten terriers have a slightly higher prevalence of noise reactivity and firework fear than standard poodles, and that older dogs are more fearful than younger dogs. Most dogs that show signs of noise reactivity display symptoms before the age of 4, but the degree of fear can worsen later in the dog's life. The study also shows that the most fearful dogs are more nervous in general, and that dogs that are the only dog in the household are more fearful than dogs that are accompanied by another dog. Estimated heritabilities in the pedigree-based study are 0.09-0.16 for fear of fireworks and 0.13-0.16 for fear of loud noise, with a high positive correlation between the two traits. The heritability estimates in this study indicate that fear of fireworks and loud noises has significant genetic components, even if the pedigreebased heritability estimates are relatively low. DNA samples from 400 standard poodles were analyzed to estimate genomic heritabilities and detect SNPs that may be associated with fear of fireworks or noise reactivity. Genomic heritabilities were calculated to be 0.28 for fear of fireworks and 0.15 for noise reactivity, with a strong genetic correlation between the two traits. Genome-wide association identified one region on chromosome 17, which shows a possible association, and this region harbors genes that may be of interest. More extensive studies with higher sample sizes will be needed to verify the study. This study found that there is a significant genetic component to fear of fireworks and loud noises and that these two complex genetic traits are strongly correlated. This study did not identify specific genes or gene variants that play a significant role in the development of a dog's fear of fireworks and loud noises. The estimated heritability of both fear of fireworks and fear of loud noises indicate that it should be possible to reduce the prevalence of these traits using selective breeding.Ett av de vanligste atferdsproblemene hos hund er frykt for lyd. Ulike undersøkelser finner store raseforskjeller, og noen også kjønnsforskjeller, men frykt for lyd synes å forekomme hos alle typer hunder. Hunder kan reagere på hverdagslyder som gryteskrammel og støvsugere, trafikk og anleggsarbeider, men også værfenomen som torden og vind, eller lyden av fyrverkeri og skudd. Eiere opplyser oftest at det er de skarpe, plutselige lydene hundene reagerer mest på, og spesielt frykt for fyrverkeri er et velkjent og hyppig diskutert tema blant hundeeiere. Frykt for fyrverkeri og lyd er trolig komplekse genetiske egenskaper som i stor grad er påvirket av ulike miljøfaktorer. Denne avhandlingen ser nærmere på de genetiske årsakene til frykt for fyrverkeri og høy lyd hos hund, med et spesielt fokus på rasen storpuddel. Det er gjennomført en serie spørreundersøkelser der hundeeiere har klassifisert hundene sine når det gjelder graden av frykt for ulike høye lyder. To av undersøkelsene er rettet mot eiere av storpuddel og Irish softcoated wheaten terriere, mens de øvrige kun er rettet mot eiere av storpuddel. Det er gjennomført ett epidemiologisk studie, ett arvegradsstudie basert på stamtavle, og et genomisk assosiasjonsstudium der målet var å beregne genomisk arvegrader og forsøke å identifisere kromosomale regioner assosiert med frykt for høye lyder

Listening under pressure : the downside of motivation

The desire for self-improvement is critical to human performance and learning outcomes. Paradoxically, however, being subjected to increased performance pressure can also result in “choking under pressure”. No studies have experimentally examined the extent to which motivation impacts native speech processing. This dissertation manipulated performance pressure in listeners, and systematically examined its impact on three speech-processing experiments. Sixty adult native English listeners and 45 non-native listeners with poorer English proficiency completed three speech processing experiments, twice – once to establish a baseline, and again to measure changes in performance. In these experiments using native English speech, listeners detected (illusionary) sound changes, categorized phonemes under lexical interference, and recognized words in noises. After baseline testing, half of the participants in each language group were instructed to work, with a fictitious partner, towards a performance-contingent monetary reward; the other half, as controls, simply performed the tasks a second time. This study demonstrated a negative impact of performance pressure on native listeners in all experiments. Relative to the controls, the motivation group were more susceptible to illusions, failed to ignore lexical interference despite prior exposure, and recognized fewer words in cognitively-demanding listening situations. Unexpectedly, relative to native listeners, non-native listeners perceived it as less important to perform well, and those who were in the high performance-pressure group requested significantly greater amount of money for improvement. These language-group differences in task-related attitudes might be a confounding factor that moderate the effect of motivation. By illustrating a complex interaction among motivation, listener status, and performance-induced demands, this dissertation highlights the importance of motivation in speech science.Communication Sciences and Disorder