Journals – Page 3 – Dr Martin Fracker

Does High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder Lead to More Difficulty Regulating Emotions?

High-functioning individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) sometimes get very upset and angry. Because other people get upset and angry too, one might wonder whether people with ASD are more likely than others to do so. If so, Samson and colleagues reasoned that people with high-functioning ASD may have more difficulty regulating their emotions. These researchers therefore compared 27 high-functioning ASD research participants with 27 matched neurotypical controls. They found that participants with high-functioning ASD experienced higher levels of negative emotions than the controls and were more likely to have difficulty regulating their emotions.

Do Autistic Individuals Have More Difficulty Remembering the Order of Non-Verbal Information?

Previous research had shown that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have more difficulty than others in remembering the order in which verbal information appeared such as, for example, the order in which one may pass through various cities on a road trip from Austin to Seattle. Bowler and colleagues wanted to see if this deficit in verbal serial recall would extend to non-verbal visual-spatial information, in this case the sequence of seven points which appeared on a map (a 3 x 4 grid) one point at a time. Participants had to recall the correct locations on the map in the exact order in which each point appeared.

These researchers found that, compared to neurotypical individuals, individuals with ASD had more difficulty remembering the order in which visual-spatial information appeared. Interestingly, their results also suggested that autistic individuals may use verbal strategies to remember non-verbal information.

How Does Autism Spectrum Disorder Affect a Person’s Memory?

If you know an individual with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), you may have noticed that they may be very good at remembering certain kinds of things such as calendar dates. There have been many studies examining how ASD may affect a person’s memory, but the results have been complex and difficult to explain. Poirier and colleagues decided to look more closely at how working memory (also known as “short-term memory”) may differ between ASD and neurotypical individuals. In three experiments, they had ASD and neurotypical individuals perform variations of a verbal serial recall task.

These researchers found that individuals with ASD could remember the verbal items just as well as neurotypical individuals but they had more trouble remembering the order in which the verbal information appeared.

Do Autistic Individuals Gesture Less than Neurotypical Individuals?

When people try to communicate with others, they may use different types of gestures to make their meaning clear. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been thought to gesture less than others, but recent research suggests whether that is true depends on the type of gesture. Deictic gestures include actions such as pointing and reaching. Emblematic gestures communicate semantic meaning such as nodding the head to mean “yes” or shrugging the shoulders to mean “I don’t know.” Iconic gestures visually represent an object, action, or concept such as forming a circle with the hands to represent a ball, sliding a hand rapidly from left to right to indicate a car racing past, and so on.

Nicola McKern and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 31 articles comparing the gestures of over 700 ASD individuals to those of 860 neurotypical individuals. They found that autistic individuals do indeed exhibit fewer deictic and emblematic gestures than others, but that they do not generally differ from others in the production of iconic gestures.

These researchers believe the most important conclusion from their analysis is that we should not prematurely rule out a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder simply because a person gestures normally to communicate.

Paying Full Attention is Crucial When Learning New Information

Some people claim they can learn new information while their attention is divided. Think of the college student who is watching television while studying for an exam. Such claims appear not to be true. Murphy and colleagues evaluated the ability of participants to learn new information while dividing their attention between studying a list of words and performing a secondary auditory detection task. They found that, compared to participants who could devote their full attention to studying the list of words, participants with divided attention performed less well in recalling the list of words later. Interestingly, the effect of divided attention while recalling the list of words was less severe. Does this mean that while students should not watch television while studying, it would be okay for them to listen to a baseball game while taking their final exam? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t recommend it!

Eye Movements Reveal How We Remember Visualspatial Information

When we have to learn something new, that new information has to get through what you might think of as “gates”: first it has to be perceived, then pass into working (or short-term) memory, and then finally into long-term memory. Moving information from working to long-term memory usually requires rehearsal, like repeating someone’s name to yourself over and over again until you have it memorized. This experiment by Sahan and colleagues shows that the same is true of visual information and answers the question: how exactly do we rehearse visual information? Their answer: we rehearse visual information with help from our eyes!

Cognitive Behavior Therapy is the Best Intervention for Social Anxiety Disorder

Mayo-Wilson and colleagues performed a meta-analysis across 41 interventions for patients with social anxiety disorder including cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, psychopharmacological therapy, and others. Based on the results from 101 clinical trials including over 13,000 participants, including various control groups, they concluded that cognitive-behavior therapy was best for most patients. For patients for whom cognitive-behavior therapy was not appropriate, they recommended psychopharmacological therapy as the next best treatment.

Recommendations for Improving Communication of Empirical Support for Clinical Interventions

Helping clinical psychologists select the best form of psychotherapy for a particular client with a particular problem requires a way to communicate to them the results of comparisons of clinical interventions. In this article, David Tolin and his associates take a detailed look at where communication needs to be improved, and they recommend actions to take now while the field undertakes a long-range process to develop better standards.

Noisy Data Makes Comparisons of Psychotherapies More Challenging

In this article, David Tolin looks at why some studies do not find cognitive-behavior therapies to be better than other forms of therapy. He identifies several sources of error variance (in other words, noisy data) that may hide any differences between the effectiveness of candidate psychotherapies. He then suggests ways to improve comparisons of such psychotherapeutic evaluations.