The perception and identification of facial emotions in individuals with autism spectrum disorders using the Let's Face It! Emotion Skills Battery.

BACKGROUND: Although impaired social-emotional ability is a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the perceptual skills and mediating strategies contributing to the social deficits of autism are not well understood. A perceptual skill that is fundamental to effective social communication is the ability to accurately perceive and interpret facial emotions. To evaluate the expression processing of participants with ASD, we designed the Let's Face It! Emotion Skills Battery (LFI! Battery), a computer-based assessment composed of three subscales measuring verbal and perceptual skills implicated in the recognition of facial emotions. METHODS: We administered the LFI! Battery to groups of participants with ASD and typically developing control (TDC) participants that were matched for age and IQ. RESULTS: On the Name Game labeling task, participants with ASD (N = 68) performed on par with TDC individuals (N = 66) in their ability to name the facial emotions of happy, sad, disgust and surprise and were only impaired in their ability to identify the angry expression. On the Matchmaker Expression task that measures the recognition of facial emotions across different facial identities, the ASD participants (N = 66) performed reliably worse than TDC participants (N = 67) on the emotions of happy, sad, disgust, frighten and angry. In the Parts-Wholes test of perceptual strategies of expression, the TDC participants (N = 67) displayed more holistic encoding for the eyes than the mouths in expressive faces whereas ASD participants (N = 66) exhibited the reverse pattern of holistic recognition for the mouth and analytic recognition of the eyes. CONCLUSION: In summary, findings from the LFI! Battery show that participants with ASD were able to label the basic facial emotions (with the exception of angry expression) on par with age- and IQ-matched TDC participants. However, participants with ASD were impaired in their ability to generalize facial emotions across different identities and showed a tendency to recognize the mouth feature holistically and the eyes as isolated parts.

Using computerized games to teach face recognition skills to children with autism spectrum disorder: the Let's Face It! program.

BACKGROUND: An emerging body of evidence indicates that relative to typically developing children, children with autism are selectively impaired in their ability to recognize facial identity. A critical question is whether face recognition skills can be enhanced through a direct training intervention. METHODS: In a randomized clinical trial, children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder were pre-screened with a battery of subtests (the Let's Face It! Skills battery) examining face and object processing abilities. Participants who were significantly impaired in their face processing abilities were assigned to either a treatment or a waitlist group. Children in the treatment group (N = 42) received 20 hours of face training with the Let's Face It! (LFI!) computer-based intervention. The LFI! program is comprised of seven interactive computer games that target the specific face impairments associated with autism, including the recognition of identity across image changes in expression, viewpoint and features, analytic and holistic face processing strategies and attention to information in the eye region. Time 1 and Time 2 performance for the treatment and waitlist groups was assessed with the Let's Face It! Skills battery. RESULTS: The main finding was that relative to the control group (N = 37), children in the face training group demonstrated reliable improvements in their analytic recognition of mouth features and holistic recognition of a face based on its eyes features. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that a relatively short-term intervention program can produce measurable improvements in the face recognition skills of children with autism. As a treatment for face processing deficits, the Let's Face It! program has advantages of being cost-free, adaptable to the specific learning needs of the individual child and suitable for home and school applications.

The Candida albicans ESCRT pathway makes Rim101-dependent and -independent contributions to pathogenesis.

Candida albicans is an opportunistic pathogen that colonizes diverse mucosal niches with distinct environmental characteristics. To adapt to these different sites, C. albicans must activate and attenuate a variety of signal transduction pathways. A mechanism of signal attenuation is through receptor endocytosis and subsequent vacuolar degradation, which requires the endosomal sorting complex required for transport (ESCRT) pathway. This pathway comprises several polyprotein complexes (ESCRT-0, -I, -II, -III, and -DS) that are sequentially recruited to the endosomal membrane. The ESCRT pathway also activates the Rim101 transcription factor, which governs expression of genes required for virulence. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the ESCRT pathway plays a Rim101-independent role(s) in pathogenesis. We generated deletion mutants in each ESCRT complex and determined that ESCRT-I, -II, and -III are required for Rim101 activation but that ESCRT-0 and ESCRT-DS are not. We found that the ESCRT-0 member Vps27 and ESCRT-DS components are required to promote epithelial cell damage and, using a murine model of oral candidiasis, found that the vps27Delta/Delta mutant had a decreased fungal burden compared to that of the wild type. We found that a high-dose inoculum can compensate for fungal burden defects but that mice colonized with the vps27Delta/Delta strain exhibit less morbidity than do mice infected with the wild-type strain. These results demonstrate that the ESCRT pathway has Rim101-independent functions for C. albicans virulence.