Further Work on Abnormal Face Processing in Children with Autism

Katarzyna Chawarska, Frederick Shic, Ami Klin and Fred Volkmar are due to present a paper at the International Meeting for Autism Research May 3-5 in Seattle, Washington. Their paper will focus on previous findings regarding face recongition in children with autism as well as new research as well.

• Toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have difficulty focusing on people's faces and making eye contact, but these researchers found that these same toddlers do not have difficulty looking at photographs of faces.
• They also found that toddlers with ASD spend most of the time examining the eyes. This is a surprising finding, given that avoiding eye contact is one of the classic hallmarks of autism.
• The results suggest that pictures of faces and eyes are, by themselves, neither inherently unattractive nor inherently aversive to toddlers with ASD. Therefore, the limited attention to faces and eyes observed in natural settings may be due to the fact that faces don't stand out to them as much as other objects in the environment.
• There also may be heightened arousal related to the complex social and perceptual context in which faces usually occur.
• The study examined visual scanning patterns and recognition of faces and abstract patterns in toddlers. The data were collected through an eye-tracking system.
• When given time to familiarize with a picture of a face, both groups spent more time looking at the outside features of the face, such as the hair, ears and the neck compared to the their typically developing peers.
• The researchers postulated that toddlers with disabilities were having a harder time encoding information regarding facial identity because they were simply looking less at facial features, which are of greatest help in extracting this type of information.
• Those toddlers with ASD who adopted a pattern of looking at faces which closely resembled the pattern of typical toddlers, were less socially impaired and were also better at face recognition
• While typical and developmentally delayed toddlers move quickly between various inner elements of the face, scanning rapidly between the left and right eye, toddlers with ASD tend to look longer at specific facial features than other children, which might signify an idiosyncratic approach to face processing specific to ASD in early development.

Dreams are random firings of neurons

the about.com site has a featured article today regarding Freud and his dreams.

Let's get a few things straight:

1. The interpretation of dreams has no reliability or validity as an assessment or intervention technique
2. Dreams are just random firings of neurons.

Our brains operate on a constructivist model, where it seeks out to organize disparate events and happenings into a coherent whole. See for example many of the conspiracy theories from JFK to a second shooter in the VA Tech shooting.

So, if someone is made to visualize certain people and hear certain voices in their sleep due to random firingsof neurons, the brain will seek to organize it into a whole, a story, a gestalt. The story is for all intents and purposes, meaningless.

Bereaved Children Of 9/11 Victims Suffered High Rates Of Psychiatric Illness

The rate of psychiatric illness among children who lost a parent in the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack doubled -- from about 32 to nearly 73 percent -- in the years following the event, according to a new study in the journal Biological Psychiatry. The study was conducted by researchers at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

More than half (56.8 percent) of the young children studied suffered from some sort of anxiety disorder, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which affected nearly three in 10 bereaved children.

Some highlights:

• More than half (56.8 percent) of the young children studied suffered from some sort of anxiety disorder
• 3 out of 10 children in this bereaved groups were positive for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• heightened activity of the brain's "stress-response system" in many children who lost a parent on 9/11
• Continued activation of this system can lead to long-term hypersensitivity to stress as adults and even impact on bone health, since the stress hormone cortisol can harm bone.
• PTSD rates were 10 times that seen in non-bereaved children
• 27.3 percent of bereaved youngsters suffered from separation anxiety, double the rate seen in non-bereaved youngsters
• 25 percent experienced generalized anxiety, double the rate seen in non-bereaved youngsters
• rates of simple phobias in bereaved children was also double that of non-bereaved children (13.6 percent vs. 5.9 percent).
• rates of major depressive disorder in bereaved children was twice that of non-bereaved children -- 13.6 percent compared to 5.9 percent, respectively
• the researchers conducted saliva analysis and idenitfied elevated cortisol levels in many bereaved children throughout the two-year study. That suggests that the HPA axis remained switched on at a relatively high level
• chronic HPA activation in childhood may make individuals hypersensitive to stressors throughout their lifespan. Chronically elevated cortisol levels can also negatively impact bone health and boost risks for insulin-related dysfunction.

How is fear learned?

An article in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience indicates that that the neural processes associated with the development of fear are the same whether humans personally experienced an aversive event or only witnessed it.

The study shows that the amygdala, which is known to be critical to the acquisition and expression of fears from personal experience, is also involved during the acquisition and expression of fears obtained indirectly through social observation.

Previous research has shown how people develop fears after first-hand experience of an aversive event—getting stung by a bee or being burned by a hot pan. In acquiring these fears, a process known as fear conditioning, the brain’s amygdala plays a critical role.

However, it’s unclear if fear conditioning can occur indirectly—that is, through social observation with no personal experience. It is also uncertain what neural processes take place in the acquisition of fears stemming from events or circumstances not experienced first-hand.
In this study, subjects witnessed a short video of another individual participating in a fear-conditioning experiment. In the video, subjects saw another person responding with distress when receiving mild electric shocks paired with a colored square.The subjects watching the video were then told they would take part in an experiment similar to the one they just viewed.

Unlike the experiment in the video, these subjects never received shocks.

The results showed that the participants had a robust fear response when they were presented with the colored square that predicted electric shocks in the video, indicating that such a response resulted from merely observing—rather than directly experiencing—an aversive event.

In addition, using brain imaging techniques, the researchers found that the amydgala response was equivalent with both when watching others receive a shock and when presented with the colored square that was previously paired with shock in the video. This finding demonstrates that similar neural systems are engaged when fears are learned through first-hand experience or by merely observing others.

The knowledge of somebody else’s emotional state may evoke empathic responses. However, as our results reveal, when others’ emotions are accompanied with vivid expressions and perceived as potentially relevant to our own future well being, we may engage additional learning mechanisms.

In a way, learning by observing others’ emotional responses is like exploiting their expertise without being directly exposed to the potential risks associated with the direct learning. This seems a very adaptive thing to do for most social animals, which could explain why it is commonly seen across species. However, it remains to be explored in what way uniquely human social abilities contribute to learning fears through social observation.

There is no such thing as a "repressed memory"

A few nights ago, I shocked my class by making the statement, "there are no such things as repressed memories". People seemed quite bothered by that. I needed to leave early from the class, so I wanted to publish some of my musings on the issue.

First, why is the concept of "repressed memory" so important to a school psychologist (or, why is it important for a school psychologist to know that there is no such thing as a repressed memory?)? It has particular relevance in cases of suspected or alleged physical and sexual abuse. It is important for school psychologists to understand how memory works and why the repressed memory is an urban psychological myth.

Second, let's get some clarity:

• A repressed memory, according to some theories of psychology, is a memory (often traumatic) of an event or environment which is stored by the unconscious mind but outside the awareness of the conscious mind.
• Some theorize that these memories may be recovered (that is, integrated into consciousness) years or decades after the event, often via therapy. They may also reoccur in dreams.
• The idea of "dissociative amnesia" makes the assumption that memory repression is possible. The repressed memory concept was popularized during the 1980s and partly the 1990s by the popular press, some feminist groups, and some psychological schools of thought
• The concept was originated by Sigmund Freud in his 1896 essay On the etiology of hysteria.
  Freud abandoned his theory between 1897-1905, and during 1920-1923 replaced it with his impulse-based concept of Id, Super-ego, and Ego.

There were two principle reasons that Freud abandoned his theory of repressed memory (Freud, Sigmund 1952. Zur Geschichte der analytischen Bewegung, from: Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden Volume 10)

• he increasingly came upon evidences in individual cases logically outruling any possibility the 'recovered' events could have occurred
• he found himself able to direct his more suggestible patients into any recollection of memory he wanted to (especially while they were undergoing hypnosis), even more so in an entirely boundless manner when he turned to sexual matters.

This is an important set of points, as the father of psychoanalysis, quickly retracted the construct of "repressed memory" for the same reason that modern researchers have also rejected this notion.

Third you may ask if there is there any scientific basis for the construct of a "repressed memory"? Well, there are some conjectures and possibilities. For example, one theory discusses how the hippocampus may selectively choose to not consolidate memories which are traumatic. Others point to the role of cortisol damage to the hippocampus. These "hypotheses" are explored in Faigman DL, Kaye DH, Saks MJ, Sanders J, eds. Science in the law: social and behavioral science issues. St. Paul, MN: West Group, 2002, pp 487-526.

I will tell you how it all turns out. These are just conjectures which don't make sense on any level neurologically.

Cortisol does indeed cause damage to the hippocampal structures and loops, but it does not erase traumatic events. In fact, what we have identified in PTSD is that many people have re-occurrences of the traumatic event, so the event memory is on a constant rewind. And, while cortisol damage may affect the person's accurate recollection of the trauma, there will still be a recollection that the event took place.

Studies of over than 10,000 trauma victims found none that repressed or recovered memories of trauma. (Pope HG Jr, Oliva PS, Hudson JI. Repressed memories. The scientific status of research on repressed memories. In: Faigman DL, Kaye DH, Saks MJ, Sanders J, eds. Science in the law: social and behavioral science issues. St. Paul, MN: West Group, 2002, pp 487-526). Similarly, some studies of thousands of abused children found no evidence at all for so-called repressed or recovered memories. Coupled with laboratory studies and other naturalistic investigations, most prominent researchers in the field agree with Harvard University's Richard McNally and consider the notion of repressed memory to be a pernicious bit of psychiatric folklore. (McNally RJ. The science and folklore of traumatic amnesia. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 11:29-33, 2004).

Then we get to young children. Young children's memory is incredibly inaccurate, as their hippocampal structures are developing from conception until about three years old. Although they may forget (I've blogged on this before), they do not "repress" the memory - they just developmentally cannot consolidate memories effectively and cannot recall them effectively.

Another difference is actual amnesia following a trauma. This is not due to any psychic events impinging upon mental makeup. Retrograde amnesia is a real neurological issue which comes about through some physical assault to the brain which causes hippocampal structures to temporarily (or in some cases permanently) not recall as effectively or efficiently. The important aspect of retrograde amnesia is that it is caused by physical etiologies and not by psychic or psychological etiology.

Later I will discuss some court cases which have impacted this area.