Self-reported empathy in adults with autism, early psychosis, and social anxiety disorder

The McNorm library: creating and validating a new library of emotionally expressive whole body dance movements

The ability to exchange affective cues with others plays a key role in our ability to create and maintain meaningful social relationships. We express our emotions through a variety of socially salient cues, including facial expressions, the voice, and body movement. While significant advances have been made in our understanding of verbal and facial communication, to date, understanding of the role played by human body movement in our social interactions remains incomplete. To this end, here we describe the creation and validation of a new set of emotionally expressive whole-body dance movement stimuli, named the Motion Capture Norming (McNorm) Library, which was designed to reconcile a number of limitations associated with previous movement stimuli. This library comprises a series of point-light representations of a dancer's movements, which were performed to communicate to observers neutrality, happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Based on results from two validation experiments, participants could reliably discriminate the intended emotion expressed in the clips in this stimulus set, with accuracy rates up to 60% (chance = 20%). We further explored the impact of dance experience and trait empathy on emotion recognition and found that neither significantly impacted emotion discrimination. As all materials for presenting and analysing this movement library are openly available, we hope this resource will aid other researchers in further exploration of affective communication expressed by human bodily movement.

Abnormalities of Gray Matter Volume and Its Correlation with Clinical Symptoms in Adolescents with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder

BACKGROUND

Previous studies have indicated abnormal gray matter volume (GMV) in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, there is little consistency across the findings within these studies, partly due to small sample size and great heterogeneity among participants between studies. Additionally, few studies have explored the correlation between clinical symptoms and GMV abnormalities in individuals with ASD. Here, the current study examined GMV alterations in whole brain and their correlations with clinical symptoms in a relatively large and homogeneous sample of participants with ASD matched typically developing (TD) controls.

METHODS

Forty-eight adolescents with high-functioning ASD and 29 group-matched TD controls underwent structural magnetic resonance images. Voxel-based morphometry was applied to investigate regional GMV alterations. The participants with ASD were examined for the severity of clinical symptoms with Autism Behavior Checklist (ABC). The relationship between GMV abnormalities and clinical symptoms was explored in ASD group using voxel-wise correlation analysis within brain regions that showed significant GMV alterations in individuals with ASD compared with TD controls.

RESULTS

We found increased GMV in multiple brain regions, including the inferior frontal gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, occipital pole, anterior cingulate, cerebellum anterior lobe, cerebellum posterior lobe, and midbrain, as well as decreased GMV in cerebellum posterior lobe in individuals with ASD. The correlation analysis showed the GMV in the left fusiform was negatively associated with the scores of sensory factor, and the GMV in the right cerebellum anterior lobe was positively associated with the scores of social self-help factor.

CONCLUSION

Our results indicated that widespread GMV abnormalities of brain regions occurred in individuals with ASD, suggesting a potential neural basis for the pathogenesis and symptomatology of ASD.

Social Anxiety and Empathy: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

OBJECTIVE

This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to clarify the association between social anxiety and affective (AE) and cognitive empathy (CE).

METHODS

1442 studies from PsycINFO, Medline, and EMBASE (inception-January 2020) were systematically reviewed. Included studies (N = 48) either predicted variance in empathy using social anxiety scores or compared empathy scores between socially anxious individuals and a control group.

RESULTS

Social anxiety and AE were statistically significantly positively associated, k = 14, r = .103 (95%CI [.003, .203]), z = 2.03, p = .043. Sex (Q_M (2) = 18.79, p <  .0001), and type of measures (Q_M (1 = 7.34, p = .007) moderated the association. Correlations were significant for male samples (r_male = .316, (95%CI [.200, .432])) and studies using self-report measures (r_self-report = .162 (95%CI [.070, .254])). Overall, social anxiety and CE were not significantly associated, k = 52, r =-.021 (95%CI [-.075, .034]), z= -0.74, p = .459. Sample type moderated the association (Q_M (1) = 5.03, p < .0001). For clinical samples the association was negative (r_clinical= -.112, (95%CI [-.201, -.017]).

CONCLUSION

There was evidence for a positive association between social anxiety and AE, but future studies are needed to verify the moderating roles of sex and type of measure. Besides, low CE might only hold for patients with SAD.

Look at me: The relation between empathy and fixation on the emotional eye-region in low vs. high social anxiety

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Fixation on another person's eye-region may be an effective measure of one's level of empathy. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that this type of empathy measure may not be appropriate for individuals with high levels of social anxiety, since avoidance or hypervigilance attentional biases towards emotional faces are frequent in this condition.

METHODS

Using eye-tracking, we measured fixation time on the eye-region of another person in participants with low vs. high social anxiety, and we correlated this measure with empathy levels. In a second eye-tracking task, the two groups of participants were presented with pairs of emotional-neutral faces to determine the presence of attentional biases.

RESULTS

While participants with low social anxiety showed an association between empathy and fixation time on the other person's eyes, the association was null for participants with high social anxiety. Attentional biases towards emotional faces were absent in high social anxiety, but social anxiety correlated negatively with fixation on the eye region.

LIMITATIONS

Our sample was made up of Psychology undergraduates, and this may have had an influence on gaze behavior towards the eye region.

CONCLUSION

Fixation on the eye region is not a valid measure of empathy in high social anxiety, possibly due to systematic eye-region avoidance.

Higher Social Anxiety Severity Predicts Better Cognitive Empathy Performance in Women but Not Men

Findings regarding relationships between social anxiety and subtypes of empathy have been mixed, and one study suggested that this may be due to moderation by biological sex. The present study examined whether accounting for general anxiety and biological sex clarifies these relationships. Undergraduates (N = 701, 76% female) completed online self-report measures of cognitive and affective empathy, social and general anxiety severity, and a behavioral measure of cognitive empathy (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task; MIE). Path analysis examined relationships among social and general anxiety severity and affective and cognitive empathy. Model modification indices showed a significant influence of sex on the path from social anxiety severity to MIE accuracy. When the model was re-estimated with this path freed, more socially anxious women, but not men, showed greater MIE accuracy. Across both sexes, general anxiety severity related negatively to self-reported and behavioral (MIE) cognitive empathy. Affective empathy did not relate to either type of anxiety. The use of path analysis to simultaneously account for overlapping variance among measures of anxiety and empathy helps clarify earlier mixed findings on relationships between social anxiety and empathy subtypes.