Empathy modulates the temporal structure of social attention

Individuals with low empathy often show reduced attention towards social stimuli. A limitation of this literature is the lack of empirical work that has explicitly characterized how this relationship manifests itself over time. We investigate this issue by analysing data from two large eye-tracking datasets (total n = 176). Via growth-curve analysis, we demonstrate that self-reported empathy (as measured by the empathy quotient—EQ) predicts the temporal evolution of gaze behaviour under conditions where social and non-social stimuli compete for attention. In both datasets, we found that EQ not only predicted a global increase in social attention, but predicted a different temporal profile of social attention. Specifically, we detected a reliable effect of empathy on gaze towards social images after prolonged viewing. An analysis of switch latencies revealed that low-EQ observers switched gaze away from an initially fixated social image more frequently and at earlier latencies than high-EQ observers. Our analyses demonstrate that modelling these temporal components of gaze signals may reveal useful behavioural phenotypes. The explanatory power of this approach may provide enhanced biomarkers for conditions marked by deficits in empathy-related processes

The perceived causal relations between sensory reactivity differences and anxiety symptoms in autistic adults

Background: Rates of anxiety are inordinately high in autistic adults. Sensory reactivity differences, such as hyperreactivity (e.g., strong reactions to sound), hyporeactivity (e.g., no, or slower reactions to pain), and seeking (e.g., fascination with spinning objects), are a diagnostic criterion of autism and have been linked with anxiety. Understanding how individuals perceive these to be causally related can impact the assessment and treatment of anxiety. Therefore, we examined the perceived causal relations (PCR) between sensory reactivity differences and anxiety in autistic adults.Method: Two hundred forty-six autistic adults aged 18–76 years took part in an online study. They completed self-report assessments of sensory reactivity differences, and anxiety, followed by the PCR scale, indicating whether they perceived their sensory reactivity differences to be more of a cause or an effect of their anxiety symptoms.Results: We found sensory reactivity hyperreactivity, hyporeactivity, and seeking to be significantly correlated with anxiety. Further, we found total sensory hyperreactivity, and visual, auditory, and olfactory hyperreactivity, to be perceived as significantly more of a cause of anxiety than an effect, and total sensory seeking, and tactile and vestibular seeking, to be perceived as significantly more of an effect of anxiety than a cause.Conclusion: Future individualized approaches to treating anxiety in autistic individuals may benefit from differentiating between potential sensory causes of anxiety (e.g. hypersensitivities) vs. potential sensory effects of anxiety (e.g. sensory seeking behaviors)

The perceived causal relations between sensory reactivity differences and anxiety symptoms in autistic adults

Background: Rates of anxiety are inordinately high in autistic adults. Sensory reactivity differences, such as hyperreactivity (e.g., strong reactions to sound), hyporeactivity (e.g., no, or slower reactions to pain), and seeking (e.g., fascination with spinning objects), are a diagnostic criterion of autism and have been linked with anxiety. Understanding how individuals perceive these to be causally related can impact the assessment and treatment of anxiety. Therefore, we examined the perceived causal relations (PCR) between sensory reactivity differences and anxiety in autistic adults. Method: Two hundred forty-six autistic adults aged 18–76 years took part in an online study. They completed self-report assessments of sensory reactivity differences, and anxiety, followed by the PCR scale, indicating whether they perceived their sensory reactivity differences to be more of a cause or an effect of their anxiety symptoms. Results: We found sensory reactivity hyperreactivity, hyporeactivity, and seeking to be significantly correlated with anxiety. Further, we found total sensory hyperreactivity, and visual, auditory, and olfactory hyperreactivity, to be perceived as significantly more of a cause of anxiety than an effect, and total sensory seeking, and tactile and vestibular seeking, to be perceived as significantly more of an effect of anxiety than a cause. Conclusion: Future individualized approaches to treating anxiety in autistic individuals may benefit from differentiating between potential sensory causes of anxiety (e.g. hypersensitivities) vs. potential sensory effects of anxiety (e.g. sensory seeking behaviors)

Individual differences in responsivity to social rewards: insights from two eye-tracking tasks

Humans generally prefer social over nonsocial stimuli from an early age. Reduced preference for social rewards has been observed in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). This preference has typically been noted in separate tasks that measure orienting toward and engaging with social stimuli. In this experiment, we used two eye-tracking tasks to index both of these aspects of social preference in in 77 typical adults. We used two measures, global effect and preferential looking time. The global effect task measures saccadic deviation toward a social stimulus (related to 'orienting'), while the preferential looking task records gaze duration bias toward social stimuli (relating to 'engaging'). Social rewards were found to elicit greater saccadic deviation and greater gaze duration bias, suggesting that they have both greater salience and higher value compared to nonsocial rewards. Trait empathy was positively correlated with the measure of relative value of social rewards, but not with their salience. This study thus elucidates the relationship of empathy with social reward processing

Brewing up a storm: developing Open Research culture through ReproducibiliTea

ReproducibiliTea Reading is a group of researchers and students who meet regularly to discuss Open Research practice. Our aim is to reduce the perceived costs of adopting open and reproducible practices by increasing Open Research literacy. We have developed our technical skills and promoted open practices that have been taken up in our research. We are also exploring ways in which Open Research objectives can be integrated into student learning activities and researcher incentives

Lack of privileged access to awareness for rewarding social scenes in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Reduced social motivation is hypothesised to underlie social behavioural symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The extent to which rewarding social stimuli are granted privileged access to awareness in ASD is currently unknown. We use continuous flash suppression to investigate whether individuals with and without ASD show privileged access to awareness for social over nonsocial rewarding scenes that are closely matched for stimulus features. Strong evidence for a privileged access to awareness for rewarding social over nonsocial scenes was observed in neurotypical adults. No such privileged access was seen in ASD individuals, and moderate support for the null model was noted. These results suggest that the purported deficits in social motivation in ASD may extend to early processing mechanisms

Repro @ SPCLS

This is the one-stop location for all repro activities at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, Univ of Reading

Differential neural and behavioural responses to social vs nonsocial rewards in adults

Social rewards (e.g. smiles) powerfully shape human behaviour, starting from early childhood. Yet, the neural pathways involved in differential processing of social and non-social rewards remain poorly investigated. To address this gap in knowledge, social and nonsocial reward images matched on valence, arousal, and low-level stimulus properties were presented to 40 adults in a 3T fMRI study. We found greater activity in the amygdala, medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and right fusiform gyrus (rFG) in response to social than nonsocial rewards. Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) analysis corroborated these findings by demonstrating that activity in mOFC and rFG distinguishes between social and nonsocial stimuli with significantly greater than chance. Individual differences in the functional connectivity between these regions was inversely proportional to autistic traits. Reduced functional connectivity between these regions may contribute to the lower social reward responsivity in individuals with high autistic traits, as also noted from their lower valence ratings to social rewards. This study provides evidence for a new experimental paradigm to test social reward processing at a behavioural and neural level, and how individual differences therein can be investigated as one important dimension to quantify neurodiversity