Findings suggest that face processing is atypical in WBS and that emotion recognition and eye gaze abnormalities in WBS are likely to be more complex than previously thought. Findings highlight the need to develop remediation programmes to teach WBS patients how to explore all facial features, enhancing their emotion recognition skills and "normalising" their social interactions.

This study investigated emotion recognition abilities and visual scanning of emotional faces in 16 Fragile X syndrome (FXS) individuals compared to 16 chronological-age and 16 mental-age matched controls. The relationships between emotion recognition, visual scan-paths and symptoms of social anxiety, schizotypy and autism were also explored. Results indicated that, compared to both control groups, the FXS group displayed specific emotion recognition deficits for angry and neutral (but not happy or fearful) facial expressions. Despite these evident emotion recognition deficits, the visual scanning of emotional faces was found to be at developmentally appropriate levels in the FXS group. Significant relationships were also observed between visual scan-paths, emotion recognition performance and symptomology in the FXS group.

The Teesside project took the underlying principle of the Kenilworth model--that people with a family history of cancer should be 'triaged' and signposted to appropriate clinical services--and applied it to a whole clinical cancer network in which inequity was the major driver for change. Unlike the Kenilworth model, the Department of Health/Macmillan Cancer Support-funded pilot project in Teesside embedded genetic risk assessment at secondary care level. The project took a 'bottom up' approach that engaged a wide variety of stakeholder groups and identified key challenges that formed the basis of a clear strategic plan. A number of specialist cancer nurses across the network had independently developed risk assessment roles over preceding years: these roles needed to be redefined prior to the creation of a small team of genetic risk assessment practitioners ('GRAPs'). This innovation challenged existing nursing roles on a local and national level. In turn, however, we were able to introduce a simple, single network-wide referral pathway, reducing workload on both primary care and tumour-specific services; to adopt a standardised genetic risk assessment pathway; and to incorporate risk assessment as a key step in the decision to enroll an individual in a clinical screening programme. Collaborative audit proved to be a useful way of engaging stakeholders and holding their attention throughout the three-year project, proving the value of the project in their terms, and embedding the changes we had made. The keys to success in this project were inclusiveness, transparency and clear strategic management.

Inferences about the psychobiological processes that underlie face perception have been drawn from the spontaneous behaviour of eyes. Using a visual paired-comparison task, we recorded the eye movements of twenty adults as they viewed pairs of faces that differed in their relative familiarity. The results indicate an advantage for novel viewpoints of familiar faces over familiar viewpoints of familiar faces and novel faces. We conclude that this preference serves the face recognition system by collecting the variation necessary to build robust representations of identity.