Self-referential cognition and empathy in autism.

BACKGROUND: Individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have profound impairments in the interpersonal social domain, but it is unclear if individuals with ASC also have impairments in the intrapersonal self-referential domain. We aimed to evaluate across several well validated measures in both domains, whether both self-referential cognition and empathy are impaired in ASC and whether these two domains are related to each other. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Thirty adults aged 19-45, with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism and 30 age, sex, and IQ matched controls participated in the self-reference effect (SRE) paradigm. In the SRE paradigm, participants judged adjectives in relation to the self, a similar close other, a dissimilar non-close other, or for linguistic content. Recognition memory was later tested. After the SRE paradigm, several other complimentary self-referential cognitive measures were taken. Alexithymia and private self-consciousness were measured via self-report. Self-focused attention was measured on the Self-Focus Sentence Completion task. Empathy was measured with 3 self-report instruments and 1 performance measure of mentalizing (Eyes test). Self-reported autistic traits were also measured with the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Although individuals with ASC showed a significant SRE in memory, this bias was decreased compared to controls. Individuals with ASC also showed reduced memory for the self and a similar close other and also had concurrent impairments on measures of alexithymia, self-focused attention, and on all 4 empathy measures. Individual differences in self-referential cognition predicted mentalizing ability and self-reported autistic traits. More alexithymia and less self memory was predictive of larger mentalizing impairments and AQ scores regardless of diagnosis. In ASC, more self-focused attention is associated with better mentalizing ability and lower AQ scores, while in controls, more self-focused attention is associated with decreased mentalizing ability and higher AQ scores. Increasing private self-consciousness also predicted better mentalizing ability, but only for individuals with ASC. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We conclude that individuals with ASC have broad impairments in both self-referential cognition and empathy. These two domains are also intrinsically linked and support predictions made by simulation theory. Our results also highlight a specific dysfunction in ASC within cortical midlines structures of the brain such as the medial prefrontal cortex

Face Masks Protect From Infection but May Impair Social Cognition in Older Adults and People With Dementia.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic will have a high impact on older adults and people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. Social cognition enables the understanding of another individual's feelings, intentions, desires and mental states, which is particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic. To prevent further spread of the disease face masks have been recommended. Although justified for prevention of this potentially devastating disease, they partly cover the face and hamper emotion recognition and probably mindreading. As social cognition is already affected by aging and dementia, strategies must be developed to cope with these profound changes of communication. Face masking even could accelerate cognitive decline in the long run. Further studies are of uppermost importance to address face masks' impact on social cognition in aging and dementia, for instance by longitudinally investigating decline before and in the pandemic, and to design compensatory strategies. These issues are also relevant for face masking in general, such as in medical surroundings-beyond the COVID-19 pandemic

Interference of Spontaneous Emission of Light from two Solid-State Atomic Ensembles

We report an interference experiment of spontaneous emission of light from two distant solid-state ensembles of atoms that are coherently excited by a short laser pulse. The ensembles are Erbium ions doped into two LiNbO3 crystals with channel waveguides, which are placed in the two arms of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The light that is spontaneously emitted after the excitation pulse shows first-order interference. By a strong collective enhancement of the emission, the atoms behave as ideal two-level quantum systems and no which-path information is left in the atomic ensembles after emission of a photon. This results in a high fringe visibility of 95%, which implies that the observed spontaneous emission is highly coherent

Lattice Sigma Models with Exact Supersymmetry

We show how to construct lattice sigma models in one, two and four dimensions which exhibit an exact fermionic symmetry. These models are discretized and {\it twisted} versions of conventional supersymmetric sigma models with N=2 supersymmetry. The fermionic symmetry corresponds to a scalar BRST charge built from the original supercharges. The lattice theories possess local actions and in many cases admit a Wilson term to suppress doubles. In the two and four dimensional theorie s we show that these lattice theories are invariant under additional discrete symmetries. We argue that the presence of these exact symmetries ensures that no fine tuning is required to achieve N=2 supersymmetry in the continuum limit. As a concrete example we show preliminary numerical results from a simulation of the O(3) supersymmetric sigma model in two dimensions.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, formalism generalized to allow for explicit Wilson mass terms. New numerical results added. Version to be published in JHE

Recovery of temperature records from slow-growing corals by fine scale sampling of skeletons

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 34 (2007): L17706, doi:10.1029/2007GL030967.We used laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA ICP-MS) to analyze Sr/Ca ratios in 5 colonies of the Atlantic corals, Diploria labyrinthiformis and Montastrea franski, each growing less than 5 mm yr−1. By targeting the centers of septa we avoided thickening deposits to achieve an analytical sampling resolution of 5-10 days. The sensitivity of Sr/Ca to temperature (−0.096 mmol/mol/°C) is ∼3 times higher than previously reported for these species and equivalent to that exhibited by fast-growing Porites corals from the Indo-Pacific. The Sr/Ca-sea surface temperature (SST) calibrations derived from these corals were not statistically different and were independent of colony growth rate over the period studied. Data from 4 D. labyrinthiformis colonies were pooled to produce a single Sr/Ca-SST calibration with a calculated standard error on the predicted ocean temperature of ±0.51°C. Applying our calibration to Sr/Ca analyses of D. labyrinthiformis skeleton deposited in the late 18th century indicated that average annual sea surface temperatures around Bermuda were ∼1°C cooler than today.This study was supported by a WHOI Ocean Life Institute fellowship to ALC, by OLI grant 25051316 to ALC and SRT, by NSF OCE-0402728 and NSF OCE- 0215905

Lost for emotion words: what motor and limbic brain activity reveals about autism and semantic theory.

Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) are characterised by deficits in understanding and expressing emotions and are frequently accompanied by alexithymia, a difficulty in understanding and expressing emotion words. Words are differentially represented in the brain according to their semantic category and these difficulties in ASC predict reduced activation to emotion-related words in limbic structures crucial for affective processing. Semantic theories view 'emotion actions' as critical for learning the semantic relationship between a word and the emotion it describes, such that emotion words typically activate the cortical motor systems involved in expressing emotion actions such as facial expressions. As ASC are also characterised by motor deficits and atypical brain structure and function in these regions, motor structures would also be expected to show reduced activation during emotion-semantic processing. Here we used event-related fMRI to compare passive processing of emotion words in comparison to abstract verbs and animal names in typically-developing controls and individuals with ASC. Relatively reduced brain activation in ASC for emotion words, but not matched control words, was found in motor areas and cingulate cortex specifically. The degree of activation evoked by emotion words in the motor system was also associated with the extent of autistic traits as revealed by the Autism Spectrum Quotient. We suggest that hypoactivation of motor and limbic regions for emotion word processing may underlie difficulties in processing emotional language in ASC. The role that sensorimotor systems and their connections might play in the affective and social-communication difficulties in ASC is discussed.This work was supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) (MC_US_A060_0034, U1055.04.003.00001.01 to F.P., MC_US_A060_0043, MC-A060-5PQ90 to Y. S., MRC studentship to R.M.).The is the final published paper originally published in NeuroImage under a CC-BY licence (RL Moseley, Y Shtyrov, B Mohr, MV Lombardo, S Baron-Cohen, F Pulvermüller, NeuroImage 2015, 104, 413-422

Highly clustered scale-free networks

We propose a model for growing networks based on a finite memory of the nodes. The model shows stylized features of real-world networks: power law distribution of degree, linear preferential attachment of new links and a negative correlation between the age of a node and its link attachment rate. Notably, the degree distribution is conserved even though only the most recently grown part of the network is considered. This feature is relevant because real-world networks truncated in the same way exhibit a power-law distribution in the degree. As the network grows, the clustering reaches an asymptotic value larger than for regular lattices of the same average connectivity. These high-clustering scale-free networks indicate that memory effects could be crucial for a correct description of the dynamics of growing networks.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

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. Using cognitive and behavioral measures, we investigated similarities and differences between the sexes in age- and IQ-matched adults with ASC (high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome). Of the 83 (45 males and 38 females) participants, 62 (33 males and 29 females) met Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) cut-off criteria for autism in childhood and were included in all subsequent analyses. The severity of childhood core autism symptoms did not differ between the sexes. Males and females also did not differ in self-reported empathy, systemizing, anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive traits/symptoms or mentalizing performance. However, adult females with ASC showed more lifetime sensory symptoms (p = 0.036), fewer current socio-communication difficulties (p = 0.001), and more self-reported autistic traits (p = 0.012) than males. In addition, females with ASC who also had developmental language delay had lower current performance IQ than those without developmental language delay (p<0.001), a pattern not seen in males. The absence of typical sex differences in empathizing-systemizing profiles within the autism spectrum confirms a prediction from the extreme male brain theory. Behavioral sex differences within ASC may also reflect different developmental mechanisms between males and females with ASC. We discuss the importance of the superficially better socio-communication ability in adult females with ASC in terms of why females with ASC may more often go under-recognized, and receive their diagnosis later, than males

Generic scale of the "scale-free" growing networks

We show that the connectivity distributions $P(k,t)$ of scale-free growing networks ($t$ is the network size) have the generic scale -- the cut-off at $k_{cut} \sim t^\beta$. The scaling exponent $\beta$ is related to the exponent $\gamma$ of the connectivity distribution, $\beta=1/(\gamma-1)$. We propose the simplest model of scale-free growing networks and obtain the exact form of its connectivity distribution for any size of the network. We demonstrate that the trace of the initial conditions -- a hump at $k_h \sim k_{cut} \sim t^\beta$ -- may be found for any network size. We also show that there exists a natural boundary for the observation of the scale-free networks and explain why so few scale-free networks are observed in Nature.Comment: 4 pages revtex, 3 figure