The efficacy of mindfulness-based therapy for anxiety, social skills, and aggressive behaviors in children and young people with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A systematic review.

Introduction: The purpose of this systematic review was to examine the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions for improving anxiety, social skills, and aggressive behaviors in children and young people (CYP) with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); summarize the results across clinic, home, and school contexts; and evaluate the quality of these interventions for clinical practice. Methods: A search of the PsycINFO, Medline (Ovid), Web of Science, and Scopus databases was conducted in June 2021, and no date restrictions were applied. Inclusion criteria were quantitative or qualitative research implementing a mindfulness-based intervention for CYP aged 6-25 years with a diagnosis of ASD, Pervasive Development Disorder, or Asperger's Syndrome. Results: We identified 23 articles for inclusion including within subject pre- and post-testing, multiple baselines, and randomized control trials, among other research designs. Of these, a quality analysis conducted using an ASD research-specific risk of bias tool found over half (14) were of weak methodological quality, whereas only four and five were found to be of strong and adequate quality, respectively. Discussion: While the results of this systematic review suggest promising evidence for the use of mindfulness-based interventions to improve anxiety, social skills, and aggressive behaviors in CYP with ASD, results should be interpreted with caution due to the limitations resulting from the overall weak quality of the studies.The review protocol was pre-registered on PROSPERO (CRD42021259125) and can be viewed at https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=259125.

Impaired P1 Habituation and Mismatch Negativity in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Passive testing of auditory function is an important objective in individuals with ASD due to known difficulties in understanding and/or following task instructions. In present study the habituation to standard tones following deviants and the auditory discriminative processes were examined in two conditions: electronic and human sounds, in a sample of 16 ASD children. ASD children presented a reduced habituation in the P1 component and a decrease in the amplitude of the mismatch negativity indicating a lower auditory discrimination with respect to controls. MMN amplitude was related to sensory sensitivity. Results suggest an increased activation to repeatedly auditory stimulus and a poor auditory discrimination, for both: electronic and human sounds with consequences on the impaired sensory behavior of ASD subjects.

Deconvolution of magnetic acoustic change complex (mACC).

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to design a novel experimental approach to investigate the morphological characteristics of auditory cortical responses elicited by rapidly changing synthesized speech sounds. METHODS: Six sound-evoked magnetoencephalographic (MEG) responses were measured to a synthesized train of speech sounds using the vowels /e/ and /u/ in 17 normal hearing young adults. Responses were measured to: (i) the onset of the speech train, (ii) an F0 increment; (iii) an F0 decrement; (iv) an F2 decrement; (v) an F2 increment; and (vi) the offset of the speech train using short (jittered around 135ms) and long (1500ms) stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). The least squares (LS) deconvolution technique was used to disentangle the overlapping MEG responses in the short SOA condition only. RESULTS: Comparison between the morphology of the recovered cortical responses in the short and long SOAs conditions showed high similarity, suggesting that the LS deconvolution technique was successful in disentangling the MEG waveforms. Waveform latencies and amplitudes were different for the two SOAs conditions and were influenced by the spectro-temporal properties of the sound sequence. The magnetic acoustic change complex (mACC) for the short SOA condition showed significantly lower amplitudes and shorter latencies compared to the long SOA condition. The F0 transition showed a larger reduction in amplitude from long to short SOA compared to the F2 transition. Lateralization of the cortical responses were observed under some stimulus conditions and appeared to be associated with the spectro-temporal properties of the acoustic stimulus. CONCLUSIONS: The LS deconvolution technique provides a new tool to study the properties of the auditory cortical response to rapidly changing sound stimuli. The presence of the cortical auditory evoked responses for rapid transition of synthesized speech stimuli suggests that the temporal code is preserved at the level of the auditory cortex. Further, the reduced amplitudes and shorter latencies might reflect intrinsic properties of the cortical neurons to rapidly presented sounds. SIGNIFICANCE: This is the first demonstration of the separation of overlapping cortical responses to rapidly changing speech sounds and offers a potential new biomarker of discrimination of rapid transition of sound.