Universidad Europea de Madrid y Psise participarán en el IX Congreso Internacional y XIV Nacional de Psicología Clínica organizado por la Asociación Española de Psicología Conductual (AEPC) que se celebrará los días 17 a 21 de noviembre 2016 en Santander.
La intervención de nuestro equipo se realizará el día 20 de noviembre a las 12.00h dentro del simposio “Social communication and interaction metodological approaches”, en el que participaremos junto con distintos expertos de la Università degli Studi di Trento (Italia), Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Austria) y de la Universidad Europea de Madrid (España).
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Emotional processing in children with autism spectrum disorders.
Giuseppe Iandolo. Department of Psychology, European University of Madrid (SI.264. 2)
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders present difficulties in intersubjective engagement, expression and categorization personal and other people’s affective states. In this study, fourteen preadolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD group) and fourteen preadolescents with Down Syndrome and Intellectual Disability, matched for gender and mental age, were assessed by using two diagnostic tools (LEITER-R International Scales and Autism Diagnostic Observation Scales) and two sets of affective images (“Pictures of Children’s Facial Affects – PCFA” and International Affective Picture System – IAPS”). Subjective emotional reports were compared between both groups and with a group of 98 preadolescents with typical development. Results suggest ASD group presents impairments in facial expression recognition and personal categorization of personal affective states depending on severity of Autism.
SIMPOSIO INVITADO / INVITED SYMPOSIUM
- Social communication and interactions: methodological approaches (SI.264).
- Chairman: Paola Venuti
- Sunday, November, 20, 2016 (12.00-13.30).
- Salón de baile (planta principal), Palacio de la Magdalena, Av. de la Reina Victoria, s/n, 39005, Santander, Cantabria (Spain).
PARTICIPANTS
- Contributing to the early identification of neurodevelopmental disorders: the retrospective analysis of pre-linguistic vocalisations in home video material. Florian B Pokorny, Björn W Schuller, Robert Peharz, Franz Pernkopf, Katrin D. Bartl-Pokorny, Christa Einspieler and Peter B Marschik. (SI.264. 1).
- Emotional processing in children with autism spectrum disorders. Giuseppe iandolo (SI.264. 2).
- Assessing emotion reactions to visual stimuli in eye-tracking and behavioural experiments. Teresa del Bianco and Noemi Mazzoni (SI.264. 3).
- Different approaches to examine the response to emotional sound. Yagmur Ozturk and Paola Rigo (SI.264. 4).
- Emotional processing in adults with typical development. Gustavo González Cuevas (SI.264. 5).
ABSTRACTS OF THE SYMPOSIA
Social communication and interactions: methodological approaches
SI.264. 1
Contributing to the early identification of neurodevelopmental disorders: the retrospective analysis of pre-linguistic vocalisations in home video material
Florian B Pokorny*, **, ***, Björn W Schuller ****, *****, Robert Peharz*, ***, Franz Pernkopf***, ******, Katrin D Bartl-Pokorny*, Christa Einspieler* and Peter B Marschik*, ***, ****
*Research Unit iDN – interdisciplinary Developmental Neuroscience, Institute of Physiology, Medical University of Graz, Austria; **Machine Intelligence & Signal Processing group, Technische Universität München, Germany; ***Brain, Ears & Eyes
Our research has focused on speech-language phenomena during the first year of life in typically developing infants, infants with brain injury, and infants with rare genetic diseases or neurodevelopmental disorders. Lately, we have been studying conditions commonly diagnosed during or beyond toddlerhood (conditions of interest hereafter: e. g., autism spectrum disorder, Rett syndrome, fragile X syndrome). We aim to define behavioural markers in the speech-language domain and consequently facilitate earlier identification to enable earlier intervention. However, the diagnosis beyond toddlerhood in combination with the low prevalence of rare genetic disorders hamper the implementation of prospective studies. We have been collecting home video material of these conditions of interest to build a database currently comprising footage of more than a year video running time. The presentation will outline our approach for defining and analysing/classifying acoustic parameters in pre-linguistic vocalisations by means of state-of-the-art signal processing/machine learning methodology as the basis for a reliable automatic detection tool. Our initial vocalisation-based experiments for automatically detecting autism spectrum disorder and Rett syndrome versus typical development using linear kernel support vector machines revealed recognition performances of 89.2% and 76.5%, respectively. Methodological challenges with regard to the inhomogeneity of home video material in terms of signal quality, recording setting, etc., and with regard to data preprocessing, i.e., the (semi-automated) segmentation and annotation of pre-linguistic vocalisations in home video data, will be addressed.
SI.264. 2
Emotional processing in children with autism spectrum disorders
Giuseppe Iandolo
Department of Psychology, European University of Madrid
biomedicasysalud.universidadeuropea.es
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders present difficulties in intersubjective engagement, expression and categorization personal and other people’s affective states. In this study, fourteen preadolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD group) and fourteen preadolescents with Down Syndrome and Intellectual Disability, matched for gender and mental age, were assessed by using two diagnostic tools (LEITER-R International Scales and Autism Diagnostic Observation Scales) and two sets of affective images (“Pictures of Children’s Facial Affects – PCFA” and International Affective Picture System – IAPS”). Subjective emotional reports were compared between both groups and with a group of 98 preadolescents with typical development . Results suggest ASD group presents impairments in facial expression recognition and personal categorization of personal affective states depending on severity of Autism.
SI.264. 3
Assessing emotion reactions to visual stimuli in eye-tracking and behavioural experiments
Teresa Del Bianco and Noemi Mazzoni
Observation, Diagnosis and education Lab., Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Italy
The relationship between cognition and emotion is a long lasting matter of debate. Namely, the link with attention is relevant and complex: emotional images are detected faster and result in stronger activation of visual areas. Being this process relatively unconscious, auto-reported estimates of emotional states are often inconsistent, especially if the emotional content is implicit. Therefore, the benefits of reliable methods for assessing the influence of emotions on dependent variables, such eye-movements, are more than imaginative. A reconciliation is offered by physiological measures of arousal, such as blinking and pupil dilatation: augmented arousal is a state of activation to significant stimuli that boosts attention and cognition. Even if arousal is not equal to emotion, feeling an emotion can increase activation, that possibly influences attentive performances. Eye blinks tend to increase when a person is stressed, while affective images provoke pupil dilation; both phenomena are mediated by sympathetic arousal. As a demonstration of the potential of these measures, we performed post-hoc analysis on eye-tracking data from 15 subjects that participated in an attentive and social-cognitive experiment. We found: 1) a negative correlation between percentage of blinking and 2) a positive correlation between pupil diameter and fixation duration on relevant areas of interest. Interestingly, increased blinks are reported to be correlated to “negative” arousal, while pupil responses are bound to unspecific changes. Performing a linear regression, interaction between Personal Distress, a score from the Interpersonal Reactivity Index Questionnaire, Blink Percentage and Pupil Diameter tended to significance. Moreover, hierarchical regression showed the better explicative power of the interactive model. We conclude that changes in the physiological measures of arousal are connected to perception of emotional stimuli, even if the affective content is not evident. Future research could benefit from assessing these parameters, instead of including boring ratings in experimental paradigms.
SI.264. 4
Different approaches to examine the response to emotional sound
Yagmur Ozturk and Paola Rigo
Observation, Diagnosis and education Lab., Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Italy.
A person’s response to emotional stimuli involves several aspects such as subjective experiences, behavior and physiology. There are a number ways to measure to understand the cognitive, physiological and behavioral process during listening of emotional sounds. As an example, behavior and brain states in addition to self-reported and autonomic responses have been considered as important measures of adults’ responses to emotive sounds.
A number of studies examined parents and non-parents’ responses to infant cry which is an emotive sound. A fMRI study examined gender differences in resting-state brain activation during the passive listening to baby cry. Recently, another fMRI study focused on the the resting-state brain activation and behavioral responses (reaction time) in association to infant crying and other emotive sounds during concomitant tasks. Moreover, another study used physiological responses (e.g., heart rate) and self-reports as measures to examine how parents’ responses to infant cry. However, each approach has its own potentiality, limits and constraints. Therefore, it is important to consider the advantages and disadvantages of each method keeping the research question and the main goal of the study in the mind.
SI.264. 5
Emotional processing in adults with typical development.
Gustavo González Cuevas
Department of Psychology, European University of Madrid
biomedicasysalud.universidadeuropea.es
Research conducted on the link between empathy, emotion, and intelligence in college students is still scarce. The present study was aimed to clarify this issue by controlling affective (emotion recognition and affective empathy) and cognitive (intelligence and cognitive empathy) variables. Recognition of basic emotional states conveyed by facial expressions (“Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces – AKDEF”) and scenes was evaluated with a non-verbal pictorial assessment technique that directly measured the pleasure, arousal, and dominance associated with a person’s affective reaction to a wide variety of stimuli (“International Affective Picture System – IAPS”). Non-verbal intelligence was measured by means of the Raven Progressive Matrices test. Finally, the Cognitive and Affective Empathy test was used to collect data on empathetic responses. Although our preliminary findings must be replicated with a larger number of participants, the coordinated actions of cognitive and affective regulation in normal emotional processing may be relevant for understanding autism spectrum disorders.
