Components of Emotional Processing in Toddlers with ASD

描述（由申请人提供）：患有ASD的老年人在情感信息的实用性和自发性使用方面表现出缺陷，但对ASD早期阶段的情感处理知之甚少。我们的初步工作表明，在情绪处理的缺陷是目前早在12个月的受影响的婴儿。在典型的发育过程中，婴儿在出生后的头几个月就能发现并确定情感线索。这些对有情感价值信息的注意偏向在依恋、沟通、移情和非社会认知的发展中起着关键作用。考虑到ASD幼儿的后期出现和更复杂的情绪处理和调节技能受到影响，本项目研究了早期出现的情绪注意技能，如情感线索的捕获，保持和偏好。关键问题是：情绪注意力的缺陷是否普遍存在，影响多种形式（例如，面部、生物运动和韵律线索）和注意力机制（例如，捕获、偏差和偏好）？是否保留了对特定情绪的定向（例如恐惧、愤怒和喜悦）？儿童感知他人情绪线索的注意力偏差与他们自己的情绪功能之间是否存在关联？早期情绪功能障碍与后期核心症状和共病症状之间有何关系？我们建议在12-24个月大的ASD、发育迟缓（DD）和典型发育（TD）幼儿（T1）中检查这些问题，并在36-42个月（T2）时进行前瞻性随访。在T1阶段，我们将使用眼动追踪评估情绪注意力对面部表情、身体动作和韵律线索的反应。我们还将研究情绪功能和调节技能的体内方面。结合眼动追踪和行为任务将使我们能够以前所未有的方式在综合征出现的早期阶段量化情绪功能，并评估它们对1-2年后结果的独特贡献。这个项目将使我们能够识别情感处理的保留域（在其上可以构建治疗），鉴定缺陷结构域（这可能是直接针对治疗），推进我们对情绪障碍对ASD核心和共病症状的独特贡献的理解（帮助确定ASD内结局和同质亚组的新预测因子），并提出了可能阐明情绪注意困难在自闭症病因学中的作用的机制。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Older individuals with ASD show deficits in the pragmatic and spontaneous use of emotional information, but little is known about emotional processing in the early stages of ASD. Our preliminary work suggests that deficits in emotion processing are present as early as at 12 months in the affected infants. In typical development, infants detect and orient towards affective cues in the first months of life. These attentional biases for affectively valenced information play a critical role in the development of attachment, communication, empathy, and non-social cognition. Considering that later-emerging and more complex emotion processing and regulation skills are affected in toddlers with ASD, this project examines early- emerging emotional attention skills such as capture by, hold by, and preference for affective cues. Key questions are: Are deficits in emotional attention general, affecting multiple modalities (e.g. faces, biomotion, and prosodic cues) and attentional mechanisms (e.g., capture, bias, and preference)? Is orienting to specific emotions preserved (e.g. fear, anger, and joy)? Is there an association between the child's attentional biases for perceiving the emotional cues of others and their own emotional functioning? What is the relationship between early emotional dysfunction and later core and comorbid symptoms? We propose to examine these questions in 12-24-month-old toddlers with ASD, developmental delay (DD) and typical development (TD) (T1) followed prospectively at 36-42 months (T2). At T1 we will evaluate aspects of emotional attention in response to facial expressions, body movements, and prosodic cues using eye-tracking. We will also examine in vivo aspects of emotional functioning and regulation skills. Combining eye-tracking and behavioral tasks will allow us to both quantify emotional functioning at the early stage of syndrome emergence in an unprecedented fashion and to evaluate their unique contribution to outcomes 1-2 years later. This project will allow us to identify preserved domains of affective processing (upon which therapies can be scaffolded), identify deficient domains (which may be targeted directly for treatment), advance our understanding of the unique contribution of emotional disturbance to core and comorbid symptoms of ASD (helping to identify novel predictors of outcome and homogenous subgroups within ASD), and suggest mechanisms that may illuminate the role of emotional attention difficulties in the etiology of autism.