Components of Emotional Processing in Toddlers with ASD

描述(申请人提供)：患有自闭症的老年人在实际和自发地使用情绪信息方面表现出缺陷，但对自闭症早期的情绪处理知之甚少。我们的初步工作表明，受影响的婴儿早在12个月时就存在情绪处理缺陷。在典型的发育过程中，婴儿在出生后的头几个月就会发现并倾向于情感暗示。这些对情感效价信息的注意偏差在依恋、交流、移情和非社会认知的发展中起着至关重要的作用。考虑到患有自闭症的蹒跚学步的儿童较晚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，如被捕获、保持和对情感线索的偏好。关键问题是：情绪注意力缺陷是否普遍，影响多种形式(如面孔、生物动作和韵律线索)和注意机制(如捕获、偏见和偏好)？是否保留了针对特定情绪(例如，恐惧、愤怒和喜悦)的导向？儿童在感知他人情绪暗示时的注意力偏向与他们自己的情绪功能之间是否存在关联？早期情绪障碍与后来的核心症状和共病症状之间有什么关系？我们建议在12-24个月大的患有自闭症、发育迟缓(DD)和典型发育(TD)(T1)的12-24个月大的幼儿中研究这些问题，前瞻性地在36-42个月(T2)随访。在T1，我们将使用眼球跟踪来评估情绪注意力对面部表情、身体动作和韵律线索的反应。我们还将在体内检查情绪功能和调节技能的方面。将眼球跟踪和行为任务相结合，将使我们能够以前所未有的方式量化综合征出现早期的情绪功能，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保存下来的情感处理领域(在此基础上，治疗可以作为支架)，识别缺陷领域(可能直接作为治疗的目标)，促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内结果和同质亚群的新预测因素)，并提出可能阐明情绪注意困难在自闭症病因中的作用的机制。

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.