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

The Representation of Objects in Apraxia: From Action Execution to Error Awareness

Apraxia is a well-known syndrome characterized by the sufferer's inability to perform routine gestures. In an attempt to understand the syndrome better, various different theories have been developed and a number of classifications of different subtypes have been proposed. In this article review, we will address these theories with a specific focus on how the use of objects helps us to better understand upper limb apraxia. With this aim, we will consider transitive vs. intransitive action dissociation as well as less frequent types of apraxia involving objects, i.e., constructive apraxia and magnetic apraxia. Pantomime and the imitation of objects in use are also considered with a view to dissociating the various different components involved in upper limb apraxia. Finally, we discuss the evidence relating to action recognition and awareness of errors in the execution of actions. Various different components concerning the use of objects emerge from our analysis and the results show that knowledge of an object and sensory-motor representations are supported by other functions such as spatial and body representations, executive functions and monitoring systems

Psychiatric disorders and headache familial recurrence: a study on 200 children and their parents

The main aim of the study was to examine the relationship between headache and familial recurrence of psychiatric disorders in parents and their children. Headache history and symptomatology have been collected in a clinical sample of 200 patients and their families, using a semi-structured interview (ICHD-II criteria). Psychiatric comorbidity was assessed by DSM-IV criteria. Chi squares and a loglinear analysis were computed in order to evaluate the main effects and interactions between the following factors: frequency and headache subtypes (migraine/not-migraine) in children, headache (migraine/not-migraine-absent/present) in parents, headache (absent/present) in grandparents, and psychiatric comorbidity (absent/present) have been analyzed: 94 mothers (47%) and 51 fathers (25.5%) had at least one psychiatric disorder, mainly mood and anxiety disorders. Considering the significant prevalence of Psi-co in children (P < 0.0001), we compared it with the presence of familiarity to headache: a significant interaction has been found (P < 0.05) showing that migraineurs with high familial recurrence of headache had a higher percentage (74.65%) of psychiatric disorders, than no-migraineurs (52.17%). Absence of headache familial loading seems to be related to psi-co only in no-migraine headache (87.5 vs. 45.5%). The occurrence of psychiatric disorders is high in children with headache, but a very different pattern seems to characterize migraine (familial co-transmission of migraine and Psi-Co?) if compared with non-migraine headache