The Nature of Facial Emotion Recognition Impairments in Children on the Autism Spectrum.

This study examined socio-emotional skills, utilizing a facial emotion recognition (FER) task featuring unfamiliar and familiar faces, in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to typically developing (TD) children. Results showed that the TD children were more proficient on the FER overall whereas ASD children recognized familiar expressions more precisely than unfamiliar ones. Further, ASD children did not differ from TD children in recognizing happy expressions but ASD children were less skilled with recognizing negative expressions. Findings suggest that ASD children possess more adept FER abilities than previously thought especially for important social others. Ultimately, a task featuring an array of positive and negative familiar and unfamiliar expressions may provide a more comprehensive assessment of socio-emotional abilities in ASD children.

BDNF increases BrdU-IR cells in the injured adult zebra finch hippocampus.

Steroid-mediated cell proliferation, differentiation, and survival can be triggered by learning, experience, and brain injury. In the uninjured canary song system, testosterone induces cell proliferation that is blocked by an antibody to brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). However, little is known with regard to the effects of neurotrophic factors on injury-induced cell proliferation and incorporation. To address this, adult male zebra finches received bilateral hippocampal lesions by infusing saline into one hemisphere and BDNF into the other. BrdU (2-bromo-5-deoxyuridine) was then injected to label mitotic cells. A greater number of BrdU-immunoreactive (BrdU-IR) cells were observed in the BDNF-treated hemisphere in the hippocampus, but not in the septum or stem cell-rich subventricular zone, indicating that BDNF promoted localized cell proliferation and incorporation at the injury site only.