Anxiety and Mentalizing: Uncertainty as a Driver of Egocentrism

Emotions shape how people understand and interact with others. Here, we review evidence on the relationship between anxiety—a future-oriented emotion characterized by negative valence, high arousal, and uncertainty—and mentalizing—the ascription of mental content to other agents. We examine three aspects of this relationship: how people with anxiety disorders perform on mentalizing tasks relative to controls; how situational anxiety alters mentalizing performance; and how autistic people, who experience the impacts of mentalizing differences, are at high risk of anxiety. We propose a bidirectional model for understanding how short-term and longer term anxiety are related to mentalizing. Key to this relationship is the aversive experience of uncertainty and the motivations that result from it

The Relationships Between Restrictive/Repetitive Behaviours, Intolerance of Uncertainty, and Anxiety in Autism:A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Autistic people are more likely to experience anxiety than their non-autistic peers. Understanding mechanisms underpinning anxiety in autism is a vital aspect of developing effective interventions. Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and restrictive/repetitive behaviours (RRBs) are proposed to contribute to anxiety for autistic people. This paper includes the first meta-analysis to investigate the associations between all three of these variables. A systematic search identified 33 papers that measured anxiety, IU and RRBs in 8347 autistic participants. Evidence was found for positive correlations between all three variables. Analysis of average participant age demonstrated that the relationship between anxiety and IU was stronger in younger participants. No significant differences were found between the associations in studies that included participants with intellectual disabilities and those that did not. A quality assessment framework identified methodological threats to validity. Most studies had good methods of recruitment; however, many anxiety and IU measurement tools were unvalidated in autistic populations. Results suggest that IU and RRBs should be considered when designing anxiety interventions for autistic people, however, the role of RRBs in particular needs to be investigated further to prevent interventions from taking away important coping strategies due to misunderstanding of causal relationships

Sleep problems in children with developmental disorders

The first chapter of Volume One contains a meta-analysis of studies comparing sleep in people with and without intellectual disabilities. The key finding was that people with intellectual disabilities slept for, on average, 23 minutes less each night and experienced poorer sleep quality. Chapter Two details an empirical study of sleep in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and a parent-identified sleep problem. Actigraphy and diary measures found no differences between the children with ASD and a typically developing comparison group. Questionnaires identified numerous sleep problems that were more commonly reported in the children with ASD. Chapter Three is a lay summary of the previous chapters

Measuring visual perspective taking in the brain with avatars and arrows::Which question are we asking?

There is an ongoing debate about the involvement of Theory of Mind (ToM) processes in Visual Perspective Taking (VPT). In an fMRI study (Schurz et al., 2015), we borrowed the positive features from a novel VPT task – which is widely used in behavioral research – to study previously overlooked experimental factors in neuroimaging studies. However, as Catmur et al. (2016) rightly argue in a comment on our work, our data do not speak strongly to questions discussed in the original behavioral studies, in particular the issue of implicit mentalizing. We appreciate the clarification of these interpretational limitations of our study, but would like to point out the differences between questions emerging from behavioral and neuroimaging research on VPT. Different from what Catmur et al. (2016) discuss, our study was not intended as a test of implicit mentalizing. In fact, the terms “automatic” and “implicit mentalizing” were never mentioned in our manuscript. Our study addressed a methodological gap between ToM and VPT research, which we identified in two previous meta-analyses on the topics (Schurz et al., 2013, 2014). With this difference in mind we show that the critical points levelled by Catmur et al. (2016) cease to apply