Introduction: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit differences in pain responsivity. This altered responsivity could be related to ASD-related social communication difficulties, sensory differences, or altered processing of pain stimuli. Previous neuroimaging work suggests altered pain evaluation could contribute to pain-related anxiety in ASD. Objectives: We hypothesized that individuals with ASD would report increased pain sensitivity and endorse more pain-related anxiety, compared to typically developing controls. Methods: We recruited 43 adults (ASD, n = 24; typically developing, n = 19) for 3 heat pain tasks (applied to the calf). We measured heat pain thresholds using a method of limits approach, a pain-rating curve (7 temperatures between 40 and 48°C, 5 seconds, 5 trials each), and a sustained heat pain task with alternating low (42°C) and high (46°C) temperatures (21 seconds, 6 trials each). Individual differences in pain-related anxiety, fear of pain, situational pain catastrophizing, depressive symptoms, and autism-related social communication were assessed by self-report. Results: There were no group differences in pain thresholds. For suprathreshold tasks, mean pain ratings were higher in ASD across both the pain-rating curve and the sustained heat pain tasks, but responses in the ASD group were more varied. Pain anxiety (PASS-Total) and pain-related fear (FOP-III-Total) were higher in the ASD group and were positively associated with pain ratings. Conclusions: Our results suggest that both sensory and cognitive experiences of pain are heightened and interact reciprocally in adults with ASD. Future studies are needed to evaluate the impact of pain-related anxiety on treatment-seeking and pain behaviors, given higher levels of pain-related anxiety in ASD.
Background: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (SZ) exhibit multisensory processing difficulties and social impairments, with growing evidence that the former contributes to the latter. However, this work has largely reported on separate cohorts, introducing method variance as a barrier to drawing broad conclusions across studies. Further, very few studies have addressed touch, resulting in sparse knowledge about how these two clinical groups may integrate somatic information with other senses.Methods: In this study, we compared adults with ASD (n = 29), SZ (n = 24), and typical developmental histories (TD, n = 37) on two tasks requiring visual-tactile spatial multisensory processing. In the first task (crossmodal congruency), participants judged the location of a tactile stimulus in the presence or absence of simultaneous visual input that was either spatially congruent or incongruent, with poorer performance for incongruence an index of spatial multisensory interaction. In the second task, participants reacted to touch in the presence or absence of dynamic visual stimuli that appeared to approach or recede from the body. Within a certain radius around the body, defined as peripersonal space (PPS), an approaching visual or auditory stimulus reliably speeds reaction times (RT) to touch; outside of this radius, in extrapersonal space (EPS), there is no multisensory effect. PPS can be defined both by its size (radius) and slope (sharpness of the PPS-EPS boundary). Clinical measures were administered to explore relations with visual-tactile processing.Results: Neither clinical group differed from controls on the crossmodal congruency task. The ASD group had significantly smaller and more sharply-defined PPSs compared to the other two groups. Small PPS size was related to social symptom severity across groups, but was largely driven by the TD group, without significant effects in either clinical group.Noel et al. Visual-Tactile in Autism and SchizophreniaConclusions: These results suggest that: (1) spatially static visual-tactile facilitation is intact in adults with ASD and SZ, (2) spatially dynamic visual-tactile facilitation impacting perception of the body boundary is affected in ASD but not SZ, and (3) body boundary perception is related to social-emotional function, but not in a way that maps on to clinical status.
Scholarship on mass public shootings has increased in recent years as comprehensive datasets have become more available. As a result, much is known about the contextual and offender related characteristics of such attacks. However, less research has been conducted on attacks that were planned but ultimately did not occur. Understanding how mass public shootings may be thwarted or averted is important for both policy and theoretical reasons. In this paper, we describe a new dataset of averted mass public shooting threats (N = 194) from 2000–2019 and compare them to mass public shootings that were completed during this time (N = 97). Several noteworthy findings emerged, including that nearly half of the averted cases were reported by a friend or acquaintance, most targeted a specific location or group, and averted cases were more likely to involve school targets and co-offenders. Implications are discussed.
This study examined the characteristics of mass public shootings from 2000 through 2019 that impacted the extent of news coverage. A negative binomial regression predicting AP story counts indicated substantially greater coverage of shootings with a high number of casualties; that target government facilities, schools, or houses of worship; that are perpetrated by younger assailants, particularly with indications of mental illness; that involve terrorism or hate-motivation; that end in the assailant’s arrest rather than death; and, to a lesser extent, that include larger shares of victims who are White, women, children, and strangers. Overall, the disproportionate coverage contributes to distorted perceptions of risk and reinforces inaccurate stereotypes about these crimes.
Interoception involves the processing of sensory information relevant to physiological functioning and is integral to building self‐awareness, emotional states, and modulating social behaviors. With the role of interoception in emotional processing and social functioning, there is growing interest in characterizing interoception in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet, there are mixed results regarding cardiac interoceptive accuracy in ASD. In this study, we explored the neural basis of cardiac interoception using an fMRI heartbeat‐counting task in order to assess neural correlates of primary interoception. We predicted that interoceptive‐specific response in the insula, a “hub” for interoception, would be related to ASD symptomatology. We investigated the relationship of insula responses during cardiac interoceptive focus and a self/caregiver‐reported autism‐related symptom scale (Social Responsiveness Scale‐2 (SRS)). Participants included 46 individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (age 8–54, mean = 19.43 ± 10.68 years) and 54 individuals with typical development for comparison (TC, age 8–53, mean = 21.43 ± 10.41 years). We found no significant difference in cardiac interoceptive accuracy or neural response to cardiac interoception focus in ASD. Several insula subdivisions had a curvilinear relationship to age, peaking in early adulthood. Interoceptive‐specific insula response was associated with adult self‐report SRS scores; this association differed by diagnostic group and was not present for caregiver‐reported scores. This work suggests that (a) there is no global deficit in cardiac interoception in ASD, but integrating interoceptive cues with social information may distinguish individuals with ASD, and (b) there is a developmental trajectory for interoceptive processing in the insula that may be relevant for socio‐emotional health. Autism Res 2020, 13: 908‐920. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay Summary We use internal sensory information from the body, such as signals from the heart, to understand our emotional response to the external world. We measured how accurately people with autism feel their heartbeat and how the brain responds to this type of information. We found no differences between the autism and comparison groups in how the brain senses heartbeats, or in how accurately people feel their heartbeats. However, for people with autism, brain responses while sensing heartbeats were related to social difficulties. This work suggests people with autism may use internal and external information in a different way.
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