Long-term Memory of Sensory Experiences from the First Pregnancy, its Peri-partum and Post-partum in Women with Autism Spectrum Disorders without Intellectual Disabilities: A Retrospective Study

Purpose: To explore the recalled experience of pregnancy and motherhood in women diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) without intellectual disabilities, focusing on sensory perceptions and mood. Methods: We retrospectively evaluated, through an ad-hoc structured interview, the sensory sensitivity during the pre-partum, the peri-partum, and the post-partum of thirty-three mothers with ASD and thirty-two neurotypical mothers. Participants also underwent a psychometric assessment about autistic traits, general sensory sensitivity, and post-partum depressive symptomatology. Results: Mothers with ASD recalled a higher sensitivity than the comparison group across the three time-points; however, during the peri-partum their recalled hypersensitivity decreases, and in the post-partum it returned as high as before childbirth. The difference in the length of recall between groups did not statistically influence our results. Higher levels of autistic traits correlated with higher depressive post-partum symptomatology. Conclusions: Mothers with ASD seem to recall their experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and post-partum period differently from neurotypical mothers, particularly in terms of hypersensitivity. The correlation with depressive symptoms and the potential role of oxytocin and of long-term memory (encoding and recollection) are discussed. Further exploring these aspects might give fundamental hints to provide tailored support to mothers with ASD during pregnancy and motherhood

The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 among a Sample of Italian Adults with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Follow-Up Study

The strict lockdowns imposed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic brought an increase in levels of stress, anxiety, and depression in the general population. However, in a previous study, our group found that individuals with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders (HF-ASD) reported an increase in their psychological wellbeing and a decrease in their daily tiredness, in relation to the social distancing measures imposed during the first Italian lockdown (between March and May 2020). In this follow-up study, conducted during the “second wave” of COVID-19, we included the same group of individuals with HF-ASD and evaluated their levels of stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD-related symptoms, tiredness, and perceived wellbeing; moreover, we compared our results to the ones we obtained during the first lockdown on the same population. We found that individuals with HF-ASD experienced higher levels of the aforementioned psychiatric symptoms during the second lockdown, with respect to the first one. These levels positively correlated with their scores at the Autism Quotient subscale Attention Switching: hence, we speculated that these symptoms might be due not only to the prolonging of the social distancing measures, but also to the uncertainty that HF-ASD participants started experiencing at the end of the first lockdown

Dissociation during Mirror Gazing Test in psychogenic nonepileptic seizures and functional movement disorders

Introduction: Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) and functional movement disorders (FMD) seem to represent the two ends of a continuum where different clinical phenotypes represent the manifestation of a common framework, involving dissociation. The aim of the present study was to assess dissociation and its subcomponents through the Mirror Gazing Test (MGT) in these functional neurological disorders (FNDs). Materials and methods: Eleven patients with PNES, 17 with FMD, and 18 healthy controls (HCs) underwent a 10-minute MGT and completed the Strange Face Questionnaire (SFQ), an ad-hoc questionnaire assessing the sensations and perceptions they had looking in the mirror, and a short version of the Clinician-Administered Dissociative States Scale (CADSS). Results: Patients with PNES, FMD, and HCs did not differ at the total score of the SFQ. Patients with PNES scored higher than HCs at the SFQ-subscale Dissociative Identity/Compartmentalization, at the CADSS Total Score and at its subscale Dissociative Amnesia, while patients with FMD scored higher than HCs at the CADSS subscale Depersonalization. Conclusions: Patients with FMD reported more sensations falling in the detachment facet of dissociation, while patients with PNES in the compartmentalization one. We hypothesized that both facets of dissociation might be important pathophysiological processes for PNES and FMD and that different instruments (self-report clinical scales vs experimental tasks) might be able to detect different facets in different populations because they assess, respectively, \u201ctrait\u201d and \u201cstate\u201d dissociation

Visual perception and dissociation during Mirror Gazing Test in patients with anorexia nervosa: a preliminary study

It has been widely shown that dissociative features might play a fundamental role in producing body image distortions in patients affected by eating disorders. Here, we hypothesize that the Mirror Gazing Test (MGT), a task consisting in mirror exposure in a condition of sensory deprivation, would elicit dissociative symptoms in a group of patients with anorexia nervosa (AN)

Interoceptive Belief Updating in Women With and Weight-Restored from Anorexia Nervosa

This experiment is based on our pilot study in interoception, wherein we investigated how individuals with and weight-restored from AN form and update beliefs in the cardiac interoception modality. In our pilot study, we found that individuals with AN hold negative performance-related beliefs, i.e., when asked to estimate how well they think they will perform in a heartbeat counting task (HCT; Schandry, 1981; see more in Note 7; referred to as Prior Prospective Self-Efficacy Beliefs; see more in Section 3), the AN group’s estimates were lower than those of the HC group. In our pilot study we found no significant differences in IAcc (see Section 3) between our three groups, but we found that the AN group had lower Retrospective Self-Efficacy Beliefs even after a successful Performance (i.e., high IAcc). However, across all groups we found that individuals who received positive feedback following their performance in the HCT gave significantly higher Post-Feedback Retrospective Estimates than those who received negative feedback. The hypotheses and power calculations in the present Pre-registration are based on the findings from our pilot study and relevant literature

Belief updating about Interoception and Body Size Estimation in Anorexia Nervosa

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder with high mortality and morbidity rates, partly due to treatment resistance and high relapse rates. Treatment adherence and recovery has been found to be hindered by insight deficits, a lack of appreciation of one’s illness, or its consequences, most frequent in restrictive AN. However, to date, insight disturbances in AN have mainly been studied in relation to treatment outcomes rather than explanatory mechanisms. One possibility is that interoception (the sensing, awareness and interpretation of physiological signals) and particularly its metacognitive aspects such as prospective (self-efficacy) and retrospective (insight) beliefs about one’s interoceptive abilities may be affected in AN. To our knowledge however such aspects of global metacognition, and their relation to key interoceptive and body perception impairments, have not been assessed in AN. Here in two experiments (nAN=51 and 28, nAN-WR=47 and 21, nHC=63 and 34, respectively), we tested, (a) how women with and weight-restored from AN (AN-WR), in comparison to healthy controls (HCs), formulate explicit interoceptive self-efficacy beliefs (i.e., estimates of performance in a cardiac perception task) prospectively and then update them following performance and then following explicit feedback and (b) how they formulate prospectively and then update following feedback two types of body-size beliefs (estimates about the envisioned body, ‘How thin it looks' vs the emotional body, ‘How thin it feels’). Results of Experiment 1 confirmed our hypotheses that the AN (but not the AN-WR) group formulated more pessimistic interoceptive self-efficacy beliefs in comparison to HCs both before and after otherwise comparable performance. In Experiment 2 we found that the AN group envisioned and felt (also the AN-WR group) their body size to be bigger than it really is in comparison to controls. Post-feedback, the AN but not AN-WR group significantly overestimated both their envisioned and emotional body and they also updated their emotional body size estimates at a slower rate than the HCs. These observed group differences in belief updating about interoceptive self-efficacy and body size estimates warrant further studies in interoceptive metacognition and belief updating in AN, and their relation with insight deficits, particularly at the acute stages of the disease

Belief Updating in Anorexia Nervosa

Belief Updating about Interoceptive States and Body Size Estimates in Anorexia Nervos