Social Anhedonia in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Psychiatry Referrals.

Social anhedonia (SA) is a widely accepted symptom phenotype in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), depression, and schizophrenia spectrum disorder; nevertheless, its clinical implications are relatively unstudied in populations of clinic-referred youth with and without ASD. Youth with ASD (n = 268) and nonASD psychiatry referrals (n = 641) between 6 and 18 years of age were evaluated for SA, ASD severity, co-occurring psychiatric symptom severity, and a wide range of common clinical correlates. Participants were parsed into youth with and without parent-defined SA, and the latter were further subdivided into youth with (SA+ alone) and without (SA/-alone) a preference for being alone. Two thirds of the ASD group met criteria for SA compared with one fourth of psychiatry referrals. SA was associated with higher rates of ASD social skill deficits, social anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia symptoms in both clinic samples. SA+ alone had the highest rates of social anxiety. Among the ASD sample, severity of social anxiety and ASD social skills deficits were relatively small predictors of SA. There was little evidence of divergence between youth with and without SA for a wide range of commonly studied biopsychosocial clinical correlates, for example, youth, family, medical, and treatment characteristics. Although factors associated with the ASD diathesis contribute to an increased risk of SA, they do not in and of themselves explain our results. Lack of syndrome specificity supports the notion that SA is a useful transdiagnostic symptom phenotype in referred youth and challenges traditional conceptualizations of ASD as a categorical clinical phenotype.

Recognition Without Words: Using Taste to Explore Survival Processing.

Many educational demonstrations of memory and recall employ word lists and number strings; items that lend themselves to semantic organization and "chunking." By applying taste recall to the adaptive memory paradigm, which evaluates memory from a survival-based evolutionary perspective, we have developed a simple, inexpensive exercise that defies mnemonic strategies. Most adaptive memory studies have evaluated recall of words encountered while imagining survival and non-survival scenarios. Here, we've left the lexical domain and hypothesized that taste memory, as measured by recognition, would be best when acquisition occurs under imagined threat of personal harm, namely poisoning. We tested participants individually while they evaluated eight teas in one of three conditions: in one, they evaluated the toxicity of the tea (survival condition), in a second, they considered the marketability of the tea and, in the third, they evaluated the bitterness of the tea. After a filler task, a surprise recognition task required the participants to taste and identify the eight original teas from a group of 16 that included eight novel teas. The survival condition led to better recognition than the bitterness condition but, surprisingly, it did not yield better recognition than the marketing condition. A second experiment employed a streamlined design more appropriate for classroom settings and failed to support the hypothesis that planning enhanced recognition in survival scenarios. This simple technique has, at least, revealed a robust levels-of-processing effect for taste recognition and invites students to consider the adaptive advantages of all forms of memory.

Wanting it Too Much: An Inverse Relation Between Social Motivation and Facial Emotion Recognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

This study examined social motivation and early-stage face perception as frameworks for understanding impairments in facial emotion recognition (FER) in a well-characterized sample of youth with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Early-stage face perception (N170 event-related potential latency) was recorded while participants completed a standardized FER task, while social motivation was obtained via parent report. Participants with greater social motivation exhibited poorer FER, while those with shorter N170 latencies exhibited better FER for child angry faces stimuli. Social motivation partially mediated the relationship between a faster N170 and better FER. These effects were all robust to variations in IQ, age, and ASD severity. These findings augur against theories implicating social motivation as uniformly valuable for individuals with ASD, and augment models suggesting a close link between early-stage face perception, social motivation, and FER in this population. Broader implications for models and development of FER in ASD are discussed.

Links Between Human and Animal Models of Trauma and Psychosis: A Narrative Review.

Traumatic experiences during development are associated with an increased risk of developing psychosis. Individuals with psychosis also report a higher rate of past trauma than healthy control subjects and worse outcomes than those who do not have these experiences. It is thought that traumatic experiences negatively impact specific neurobiological processes to confer this increased risk, and that systems affected by trauma are similarly changed in individuals with psychosis. Examining animal models of psychosis and the shared neurobiological changes in response to stressors can offer valuable insight into biological mechanisms that mediate symptoms and targets for intervention. This targeted review highlights a subset of models of psychosis across humans and animals, examines the similarities with the brain's response to stress and traumatic events, and discusses how these models may interact. Suggestions for future research are described.