Neural mechanisms of social-emotional dysfunction in autism spectrum disorder and conduct disorder

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and individuals with conduct disorder (CD) are characterized by notable impairments in social-emotional functioning. In this thesis social-emotional impairments were investigated using a cognitive neuroscience perspective (i.e., studying cognitive mechanisms and associated neural processes and structures). First, we directly compared groups of ASD and CD to test the hypothesized dissociable deficits in understanding other’s emotions in ASD in contrast to deficits in feeling other’s emotions in CD. This was done by comparing brain activity during basic emotion processing to assess cognitive and affective aspects of empathy, and by comparing white matter tracts that may underlie social-emotional processing. Second, we examined the neural processes at the level of social interactions in ASD and in CD, which has been overlooked by prior work, by studying interactive decision-making in response to other’s emotions. The results of the first part of this thesis show that different neural mechanisms underlie social-emotional difficulties in ASD and CD. Results of the second part imply that uncovering the neural correlates of interacting with others might lead to refined models of social-emotional deficits in ASD and CD that are different from previous accounts based on merely observing other’s emotions.The studies described in this thesis were supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) Grant No. 056-23-011.LUMC / Geneeskunde Repositoriu

De ontwikkeling van het sociale brein: meer begrip van sociale en antisociale trajecten

Sociale vaardigheden zijn cruciaal voor een goede ontwikkeling van kind tot volwassene. In dit artikel bespreken we de ontwikkeling van het sociale brein, opgedeeld in verschillende hersennetwerken die betrokken zijn bij verschillende sociale vaardigheden. We richten ons met name op de adolescentie, een vormende periode, waarin jongeren zich kunnen ontwikkelen tot sociaal-betrokken volwassenen. Ook bespreken we wat bekend is over het functioneren van deze hersennetwerken bij jongeren die antisociaal gedrag vertonen, een groep jongeren die deels gekenmerkt wordt door afwijkend sociaal functioneren en het benadelen van anderen. De hersengebieden die zijn betrokken bij acceptatie en afwijzing en het ervaren van empathie zijn gevoelig voor onderlinge verschillen en omgevingsinvloeden, en lijken grotendeels uitgerijpt voor de adolescentie. Het hersennetwerk voor perspectief nemen ontwikkelt zich structureel en functioneel nog door gedurende de adolescentie. Ook wijken deze netwerken op verschillende manieren af bij jongeren die antisociaal gedrag vertonen; met name op het gebied van empathie en perspectief nemen.Pathways through Adolescenc

Neural mechanisms of criminal decision making in adolescence: The roles of executive functioning and empathy

Adolescence is a time of change in which there is an increase and peak in criminal behavior. This chapter discusses the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying criminal decision making in adolescents. First, it provides a brief overview of the neural basis of decision making in typically developing adolescents. Second, it discusses studies that examine decision-making processes in delinquent and antisocial adolescents compared to their typically developing peers. The chapter focuses on executive functioning and empathy, and it is concluded that delinquent and antisocial adolescents mainly display affective deficits. This is manifested in risky and impulsive decisions and in impaired sensitivity to the distress and perspectives of other people. Finally, the chapter argues that future research on criminal decision making in adolescence could benefit from focusing on subgroups of offenders and from including environmental factors such as peer influence in experimental designs.Pathways through Adolescenc

Differential Fairness Decisions and Brain Responses After Expressed Emotions of Others in Boys with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Little is known about how emotions expressed by others influence social decisions and associated brain responses in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We investigated the neural mechanisms underlying fairness decisions in response to explicitly expressed emotions of others in boys with ASD and typically developing (TD) boys. Participants with ASD adjusted their allocation behavior in response to the emotions but reacted less unfair than TD controls in response to happiness. We also found reduced brain responses in the precental gyrus in the ASD versus TD group when receiving happy versus angry reactions and autistic traits were positively associated with activity in the postcentral gyrus. These results provide indications for a role of precentral and postcentral gyrus in social-affective difficulties in ASD

Qoala-T: A supervised-learning tool for quality control of FreeSurfer segmented MRI data

Performing quality control to detect image artifacts and data-processing errors is crucial in structural magnetic resonance imaging, especially in developmental studies. Currently, many studies rely on visual inspection by trained raters for quality control. The subjectivity of these manual procedures lessens comparability between studies, and with growing study sizes quality control is increasingly time consuming. In addition, both inter-rater as well as intra-rater variability of manual quality control is high and may lead to inclusion of poor quality scans and exclusion of scans of usable quality. In the current study we present the Qoala-T tool, which is an easy and free to use supervised-learning model to reduce rater bias and misclassification in manual quality control procedures using FreeSurfer-processed scans. First, we manually rated quality of N ¼ 784 FreeSurfer-processed T1- weighted scans acquired in three different waves in a longitudinal study. Different supervised-learning models were then compared to predict manual quality ratings using FreeSurfer segmented output data. Results show that the Qoala-T tool using random forests is able to predict scan quality with both high sensitivity and specificity (mean area under the curve (AUC) ¼ 0.98). In addition, the Qoala-T tool was also able to adequately predict the quality of two novel unseen datasets (total N ¼ 872). Finally, analyses of age effects showed that younger participants were more likely to have lower scan quality, underlining that scan quality might confound findings attributed to age effects. These outcomes indicate that this procedure could further help to reduce variability related to manual quality control, thereby benefiting the comparability of data quality between studies

Dissociable relations between amygdala subregional networks and psychopathy trait dimensions in conduct‐disordered juvenile offenders

Psychopathy is a serious psychiatric phenomenon characterized by a pathological constellation of affective (e.g., callous, unemotional), interpersonal (e.g., manipulative, egocentric), and behavioral (e.g., impulsive, irresponsible) personality traits. Though amygdala subregional defects are suggested in psychopathy, the functionality and connectivity of different amygdala subnuclei is typically disregarded in neurocircuit-level analyses of psychopathic personality. Hence, little is known of how amygdala subregional networks may contribute to psychopathy and its underlying trait assemblies in severely antisocial people. We addressed this important issue by uniquely examining the intrinsic functional connectivity of basolateral (BLA) and centromedial (CMA) amygdala networks in relation to affective, interpersonal, and behavioral traits of psychopathy, in conduct-disordered juveniles with a history of serious delinquency (N 5 50, mean age 5 16.83 6 1.32). As predicted, amygdalar connectivity profiles exhibited dissociable relations with different traits of psychopathy. Interpersonal psychopathic traits not only related to increased connectivity of BLA and CMA with a corticostriatal network formation accommodating reward processing, but also predicted stronger CMA connectivity with a network of cortical midline structures supporting sociocognitive processes. In contrast, affective psychopathic traits related to diminished CMA connectivity with a frontolimbic network serving salience processing and affective responding. Finally, behavioral psychopathic traits related to heightened BLA connectivity with a frontoparietal cluster implicated in regulatory executive functioning. We suggest that these traitspecific shifts in amygdalar connectivity could be particularly relevant to the psychopathic phenotype, as they may fuel a self-centered, emotionally cold, and behaviorally disinhibited profile. Hum Brain Mapp 37:4017–4033, 2016

Neural processing of socioemotional content in conduct-disordered juvenile offenders with limited prosocial emotions

Education and Child Studie

ENIGMA and global neuroscience: A decade of large-scale studies of the brain in health and disease across more than 40 countries

This review summarizes the last decade of work by the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Consortium, a global alliance of over 1400 scientists across 43 countries, studying the human brain in health and disease. Building on large-scale genetic studies that discovered the first robustly replicated genetic loci associated with brain metrics, ENIGMA has diversified into over 50 working groups (WGs), pooling worldwide data and expertise to answer fundamental questions in neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, and genetics. Most ENIGMA WGs focus on specific psychiatric and neurological conditions, other WGs study normal variation due to sex and gender differences, or development and aging; still other WGs develop methodological pipelines and tools to facilitate harmonized analyses of "big data" (i.e., genetic and epigenetic data, multimodal MRI, and electroencephalography data). These international efforts have yielded the largest neuroimaging studies to date in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, epilepsy, and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. More recent ENIGMA WGs have formed to study anxiety disorders, suicidal thoughts and behavior, sleep and insomnia, eating disorders, irritability, brain injury, antisocial personality and conduct disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. Here, we summarize the first decade of ENIGMA's activities and ongoing projects, and describe the successes and challenges encountered along the way. We highlight the advantages of collaborative large-scale coordinated data analyses for testing reproducibility and robustness of findings, offering the opportunity to identify brain systems involved in clinical syndromes across diverse samples and associated genetic, environmental, demographic, cognitive, and psychosocial factors

Neural mechanisms of social-emotional dysfunction in autism spectrum disorder and conduct disorder

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and individuals with conduct disorder (CD) are characterized by notable impairments in social-emotional functioning. In this thesis social-emotional impairments were investigated using a cognitive neuroscience perspective (i.e., studying cognitive mechanisms and associated neural processes and structures). First, we directly compared groups of ASD and CD to test the hypothesized dissociable deficits in understanding other’s emotions in ASD in contrast to deficits in feeling other’s emotions in CD. This was done by comparing brain activity during basic emotion processing to assess cognitive and affective aspects of empathy, and by comparing white matter tracts that may underlie social-emotional processing. Second, we examined the neural processes at the level of social interactions in ASD and in CD, which has been overlooked by prior work, by studying interactive decision-making in response to other’s emotions. The results of the first part of this thesis show that different neural mechanisms underlie social-emotional difficulties in ASD and CD. Results of the second part imply that uncovering the neural correlates of interacting with others might lead to refined models of social-emotional deficits in ASD and CD that are different from previous accounts based on merely observing other’s emotions.</p