Sophie Sowden | University of Birmingham (original) (raw)
Papers by Sophie Sowden
Over the past two decades, there have been increasing discussions around which terms should be us... more Over the past two decades, there have been increasing discussions around which terms should be used to talk about autism. Whilst these discussions have largely revolved around the suitability of identity-first language and person-first language, more recently this debate has broadened to encompass other autism-related terminology (e.g., “high-functioning”). To date, academic studies have not investigated the language preferences of autistic individuals outside of the UK or Australia, nor have they compared levels of endorsement across countries. Hence, the current study adopted a mixed-methods approach, employing both quantitative and qualitative techniques, to explore the linguistic preferences of 654 English-speaking autistic adults across the globe. Despite variation in levels of endorsement between countries, we found that the most popular terms were similar- the terms “‘Autism”, “Autistic person”, “Is autistic”, “Neurological/Brain Difference”, “Differences”, “Challenges”, “Dif...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Jul 21, 2023
Difficulties in reasoning about others’ mental states (i.e., mentalising / Theory of Mind) are hi... more Difficulties in reasoning about others’ mental states (i.e., mentalising / Theory of Mind) are highly prevalent among disorders featuring dopamine dysfunctions (e.g., Parkinson’s disease) and significantly affect individuals’ quality of life. However, due to multiple confounding factors inherent to existing patient studies, currently little is known about whether these socio-cognitive symptoms originate from aberrant dopamine signalling or from psychosocial changes unrelated to dopamine. The present study therefore investigated the role of dopamine in modulating mentalising in a sample of healthy volunteers. We used a double-blind, placebo-controlled procedure to test the effect of the D2 antagonist haloperidol on mental state attribution, using an adaptation of the Heider & Simmel (1944) animations task. On two separate days, once after receiving 2.5mg haloperidol and once after receiving placebo, 33 healthy adult participants viewed and labelled short videos of two triangles depicting mental state (e.g., surprising) and non-mental state (e.g., following) interactions. Using Bayesian mixed effects models we observed that haloperidol decreased accuracy in labelling both mental- and non-mental state animations. Our secondary analyses suggest that dopamine modulates inference from mental- and non-mental state animations via independent mechanisms, pointing towards two putative pathways underlying the dopaminergic modulation ofmentalstate attribution: Action representation and a shared mechanism supporting mentalising and emotion recognition. We conclude that dopamine is causally implicated in Theory of Mind. Our results have implications for the neurochemical basis of socio-cognitive difficulties in patients with dopamine dysfunctions and generate new hypotheses about the specific dopamine-mediated mechanisms underlying social cognition.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Dec 3, 2021
SummarySome theories of human cultural evolution posit that humans have social-specific learning ... more SummarySome theories of human cultural evolution posit that humans have social-specific learning mechanisms that are adaptive specialisations moulded by natural selection to cope with the pressures of group living. However, the existence of neurochemical pathways that are specialised for learning from social information and from individual experience is widely debated. Cognitive neuroscientific studies present mixed evidence for social-specific learning mechanisms: some studies find dissociable neural correlates for social and individual learning whereas others find the same brain areas and, dopamine-mediated, computations involved in both. Here we demonstrate that, like individual learning, social learning is modulated by the dopamine D2 receptor antagonist haloperidol when social information is the primary learning source, but not when it comprises a secondary, additional element. Two groups (total N = 43) completed a decision-making task which required primary learning, from own experience, and secondary learning from an additional source. For one group the primary source was social, and secondary was individual; for the other group this was reversed. Haloperidol affected primary learning irrespective of social/individual nature, with no effect on learning from the secondary source. Thus, we illustrate that neurochemical mechanisms underpinning learning can be dissociated along a primary-secondary but not a social-individual axis. These results resolve conflict in the literature and support an expanding field showing that, rather than being specialised for particular inputs, neurochemical pathways in the human brain can process both social and non-social cues and arbitrate between the two depending upon which cue is primarily relevant for the task at hand.
Recent findings suggest that stigma and camouflaging contribute to mental health difficulties for... more Recent findings suggest that stigma and camouflaging contribute to mental health difficulties for autistic individuals, however, this evidence is largely based on UK samples. While studies have shown cross-cultural differences in levels of autism-related stigma, it remains unclear whether camouflaging and mental health difficulties vary across cultures. Hence, the current study had two aims: firstly, to determine whether significant relationships between autism acceptance, camouflaging, and mental health difficulties replicate in a more diverse cross-cultural sample of autistic adults and, secondly, to compare these variables across cultures. To fulfil these aims, 306 autistic adults from eight countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States) completed an online survey. Our results revealed that external acceptance and personal acceptance predicted lower levels of depression but not camouflaging or stress. Higher cam...
Emotion recognition abilities are fundamental to our everyday social interaction. A large number ... more Emotion recognition abilities are fundamental to our everyday social interaction. A large number of clinical populations show impairments in this domain, with emotion recognition atypicalities being particularly prevalent among disorders exhibiting a dopamine system disruption (e.g., Parkinson’s disease). Although this suggests a role for dopamine in emotion recognition, studies employing dopamine manipulation in healthy volunteers have exhibited mixed neural findings and no behavioural modulation. Interestingly, whilst a dependence of dopaminergic drug effects on individual baseline dopamine function has been well established in other cognitive domains, the emotion recognition literature so far has failed to account for these possible interindividual differences. The present within-subjects study therefore tested the effects of the dopamine D2 antagonist haloperidol on emotion recognition from dynamic, whole-body stimuli while accounting for interindividual differences in baseline ...
International Journal of Eating Disorders
OSF project (embargoed until paper acceptance) of the data, scripts and materials required to rep... more OSF project (embargoed until paper acceptance) of the data, scripts and materials required to reproduce the method and data analysis reported in the above paper.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, characterized by difficutlies in... more Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, characterized by difficutlies in social communication, and restricted and repetitive interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Given that the ability to infer emotion from facial expressions is crucial for social interaction, emotion recognition has long been suspected to be a core difficulty within ASD (Hobson, 1986). However, whilst many studies suggest a disparity in the facial expression recognition ability of autistic and neurotypical individuals (Ashwin, Chapman, Colle, & Baron‐Cohen, 2006; Dziobek, Bahnemann, Convit, & Heekeren, 2010; Lindner & Rosén, 2006; Philip et al., 2010), there have been inconsistent findings, ranging from no differences between autistic and neurotypical individuals to large disparities (see Keating & Cook, in press, and Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2012 for reviews). Despite these inconsistencies, the evidence largely suggests that there are differences in facial expression recognitio...
Despite ever-growing interest in the “social brain ” and the search for the neural underpinnings ... more Despite ever-growing interest in the “social brain ” and the search for the neural underpinnings of social cognition, we are yet to fully understand the basic neu-rocognitive mechanisms underlying com-plex social behaviors. One such candidate mechanism is the control of neural rep-resentations of the self and of other peo-ple (Brass et al., 2009; Spengler et al., 2009a), and it is likely that “common” disorders of social cognition such as autism and schizophrenia involve atypi-cal modulation of self and other repre-sentations (Cook and Bird, 2012; Ferri et al., 2012). This opinion piece will first
SummarySome theories of human cultural evolution posit that humans have social-specific learning ... more SummarySome theories of human cultural evolution posit that humans have social-specific learning mechanisms that are adaptive specialisations moulded by natural selection to cope with the pressures of group living. However, the existence of neurochemical pathways that are specialised for learning from social information and from individual experience is widely debated. Cognitive neuroscientific studies present mixed evidence for social-specific learning mechanisms: some studies find dissociable neural correlates for social and individual learning whereas others find the same brain areas and, dopamine-mediated, computations involved in both. Here we demonstrate that, like individual learning, social learning is modulated by the dopamine D2 receptor antagonist haloperidol when social information is the primary learning source, but not when it comprises a secondary, additional element. Two groups (total N = 43) completed a decision-making task which required primary learning, from own ...
Recent developments suggest that autistic individuals may require static and dynamic angry expres... more Recent developments suggest that autistic individuals may require static and dynamic angry expressions to be of higher emotional intensity in order for them to be successfully identified. In the case of dynamic stimuli, autistic individuals require angry facial motion to have a higher speed. Therefore, it is plausible that autistic individuals do not have a ‘deficit’ in angry expression recognition, but rather their internal representation of these expressions is characterized by very high-speed movement. In this (pre-registered) study, 25 autistic and 25 non-autistic adults matched on age, gender, non-verbal reasoning and alexithymia completed a novel emotion-based task which employed dynamic displays of happy, angry and sad point light facial (PLF) expressions. On each trial, participants moved a slider to manipulate the speed of a PLF stimulus such that it moved at a speed that, in their ‘mind’s eye’, was typical of happy, angry or sad expressions. Results showed that participant...
Consciousness and cognition, 2018
Social conformity is a class of social influence whereby exposure to the attitudes and beliefs of... more Social conformity is a class of social influence whereby exposure to the attitudes and beliefs of a group causes an individual to alter their own attitudes and beliefs towards those of the group. Compliance and acceptance are varieties of social influence distinguished on the basis of the attitude change brought about. Compliance involves public, but not private conformity, while acceptance occurs when group norms are internalised and conformity is demonstrated both in public and in private. Most contemporary paradigms measuring conformity conflate compliance and acceptance, while the few studies to have addressed this issue have done so using between-subjects designs, decreasing their sensitivity. Here we present a novel task which measures compliance and acceptance on a within-subjects basis. Data from a small sample reveal that compliance and acceptance can co-occur, that compliance is increased with an increasing majority, and demonstrate the usefulness of the task for future st...
Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, Nov 1, 2016
Alexithymia is a subclinical condition traditionally characterized by difficulties identifying an... more Alexithymia is a subclinical condition traditionally characterized by difficulties identifying and describing one's own emotions. Recent formulations of alexithymia, however, suggest that the condition may result from a generalized impairment in the perception of all bodily signals ("interoception"). Interoceptive accuracy has been associated with a variety of deficits in social cognition, but recently with an improved ability to inhibit the automatic tendency to imitate the actions of others. The current study tested the consequences for social cognition of the hypothesized association between alexithymia and impaired interoception by examining the relationship between alexithymia and the ability to inhibit imitation. If alexithymia is best characterized as a general interoceptive impairment, then one would predict that alexithymia would have the same relationship with the ability to control imitation as does interoceptive accuracy. Forty-three healthy adults complete...
Over the past two decades, there have been increasing discussions around which terms should be us... more Over the past two decades, there have been increasing discussions around which terms should be used to talk about autism. Whilst these discussions have largely revolved around the suitability of identity-first language and person-first language, more recently this debate has broadened to encompass other autism-related terminology (e.g., “high-functioning”). To date, academic studies have not investigated the language preferences of autistic individuals outside of the UK or Australia, nor have they compared levels of endorsement across countries. Hence, the current study adopted a mixed-methods approach, employing both quantitative and qualitative techniques, to explore the linguistic preferences of 654 English-speaking autistic adults across the globe. Despite variation in levels of endorsement between countries, we found that the most popular terms were similar- the terms “‘Autism”, “Autistic person”, “Is autistic”, “Neurological/Brain Difference”, “Differences”, “Challenges”, “Dif...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Jul 21, 2023
Difficulties in reasoning about others’ mental states (i.e., mentalising / Theory of Mind) are hi... more Difficulties in reasoning about others’ mental states (i.e., mentalising / Theory of Mind) are highly prevalent among disorders featuring dopamine dysfunctions (e.g., Parkinson’s disease) and significantly affect individuals’ quality of life. However, due to multiple confounding factors inherent to existing patient studies, currently little is known about whether these socio-cognitive symptoms originate from aberrant dopamine signalling or from psychosocial changes unrelated to dopamine. The present study therefore investigated the role of dopamine in modulating mentalising in a sample of healthy volunteers. We used a double-blind, placebo-controlled procedure to test the effect of the D2 antagonist haloperidol on mental state attribution, using an adaptation of the Heider & Simmel (1944) animations task. On two separate days, once after receiving 2.5mg haloperidol and once after receiving placebo, 33 healthy adult participants viewed and labelled short videos of two triangles depicting mental state (e.g., surprising) and non-mental state (e.g., following) interactions. Using Bayesian mixed effects models we observed that haloperidol decreased accuracy in labelling both mental- and non-mental state animations. Our secondary analyses suggest that dopamine modulates inference from mental- and non-mental state animations via independent mechanisms, pointing towards two putative pathways underlying the dopaminergic modulation ofmentalstate attribution: Action representation and a shared mechanism supporting mentalising and emotion recognition. We conclude that dopamine is causally implicated in Theory of Mind. Our results have implications for the neurochemical basis of socio-cognitive difficulties in patients with dopamine dysfunctions and generate new hypotheses about the specific dopamine-mediated mechanisms underlying social cognition.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Dec 3, 2021
SummarySome theories of human cultural evolution posit that humans have social-specific learning ... more SummarySome theories of human cultural evolution posit that humans have social-specific learning mechanisms that are adaptive specialisations moulded by natural selection to cope with the pressures of group living. However, the existence of neurochemical pathways that are specialised for learning from social information and from individual experience is widely debated. Cognitive neuroscientific studies present mixed evidence for social-specific learning mechanisms: some studies find dissociable neural correlates for social and individual learning whereas others find the same brain areas and, dopamine-mediated, computations involved in both. Here we demonstrate that, like individual learning, social learning is modulated by the dopamine D2 receptor antagonist haloperidol when social information is the primary learning source, but not when it comprises a secondary, additional element. Two groups (total N = 43) completed a decision-making task which required primary learning, from own experience, and secondary learning from an additional source. For one group the primary source was social, and secondary was individual; for the other group this was reversed. Haloperidol affected primary learning irrespective of social/individual nature, with no effect on learning from the secondary source. Thus, we illustrate that neurochemical mechanisms underpinning learning can be dissociated along a primary-secondary but not a social-individual axis. These results resolve conflict in the literature and support an expanding field showing that, rather than being specialised for particular inputs, neurochemical pathways in the human brain can process both social and non-social cues and arbitrate between the two depending upon which cue is primarily relevant for the task at hand.
Recent findings suggest that stigma and camouflaging contribute to mental health difficulties for... more Recent findings suggest that stigma and camouflaging contribute to mental health difficulties for autistic individuals, however, this evidence is largely based on UK samples. While studies have shown cross-cultural differences in levels of autism-related stigma, it remains unclear whether camouflaging and mental health difficulties vary across cultures. Hence, the current study had two aims: firstly, to determine whether significant relationships between autism acceptance, camouflaging, and mental health difficulties replicate in a more diverse cross-cultural sample of autistic adults and, secondly, to compare these variables across cultures. To fulfil these aims, 306 autistic adults from eight countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States) completed an online survey. Our results revealed that external acceptance and personal acceptance predicted lower levels of depression but not camouflaging or stress. Higher cam...
Emotion recognition abilities are fundamental to our everyday social interaction. A large number ... more Emotion recognition abilities are fundamental to our everyday social interaction. A large number of clinical populations show impairments in this domain, with emotion recognition atypicalities being particularly prevalent among disorders exhibiting a dopamine system disruption (e.g., Parkinson’s disease). Although this suggests a role for dopamine in emotion recognition, studies employing dopamine manipulation in healthy volunteers have exhibited mixed neural findings and no behavioural modulation. Interestingly, whilst a dependence of dopaminergic drug effects on individual baseline dopamine function has been well established in other cognitive domains, the emotion recognition literature so far has failed to account for these possible interindividual differences. The present within-subjects study therefore tested the effects of the dopamine D2 antagonist haloperidol on emotion recognition from dynamic, whole-body stimuli while accounting for interindividual differences in baseline ...
International Journal of Eating Disorders
OSF project (embargoed until paper acceptance) of the data, scripts and materials required to rep... more OSF project (embargoed until paper acceptance) of the data, scripts and materials required to reproduce the method and data analysis reported in the above paper.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, characterized by difficutlies in... more Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, characterized by difficutlies in social communication, and restricted and repetitive interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Given that the ability to infer emotion from facial expressions is crucial for social interaction, emotion recognition has long been suspected to be a core difficulty within ASD (Hobson, 1986). However, whilst many studies suggest a disparity in the facial expression recognition ability of autistic and neurotypical individuals (Ashwin, Chapman, Colle, & Baron‐Cohen, 2006; Dziobek, Bahnemann, Convit, & Heekeren, 2010; Lindner & Rosén, 2006; Philip et al., 2010), there have been inconsistent findings, ranging from no differences between autistic and neurotypical individuals to large disparities (see Keating & Cook, in press, and Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2012 for reviews). Despite these inconsistencies, the evidence largely suggests that there are differences in facial expression recognitio...
Despite ever-growing interest in the “social brain ” and the search for the neural underpinnings ... more Despite ever-growing interest in the “social brain ” and the search for the neural underpinnings of social cognition, we are yet to fully understand the basic neu-rocognitive mechanisms underlying com-plex social behaviors. One such candidate mechanism is the control of neural rep-resentations of the self and of other peo-ple (Brass et al., 2009; Spengler et al., 2009a), and it is likely that “common” disorders of social cognition such as autism and schizophrenia involve atypi-cal modulation of self and other repre-sentations (Cook and Bird, 2012; Ferri et al., 2012). This opinion piece will first
SummarySome theories of human cultural evolution posit that humans have social-specific learning ... more SummarySome theories of human cultural evolution posit that humans have social-specific learning mechanisms that are adaptive specialisations moulded by natural selection to cope with the pressures of group living. However, the existence of neurochemical pathways that are specialised for learning from social information and from individual experience is widely debated. Cognitive neuroscientific studies present mixed evidence for social-specific learning mechanisms: some studies find dissociable neural correlates for social and individual learning whereas others find the same brain areas and, dopamine-mediated, computations involved in both. Here we demonstrate that, like individual learning, social learning is modulated by the dopamine D2 receptor antagonist haloperidol when social information is the primary learning source, but not when it comprises a secondary, additional element. Two groups (total N = 43) completed a decision-making task which required primary learning, from own ...
Recent developments suggest that autistic individuals may require static and dynamic angry expres... more Recent developments suggest that autistic individuals may require static and dynamic angry expressions to be of higher emotional intensity in order for them to be successfully identified. In the case of dynamic stimuli, autistic individuals require angry facial motion to have a higher speed. Therefore, it is plausible that autistic individuals do not have a ‘deficit’ in angry expression recognition, but rather their internal representation of these expressions is characterized by very high-speed movement. In this (pre-registered) study, 25 autistic and 25 non-autistic adults matched on age, gender, non-verbal reasoning and alexithymia completed a novel emotion-based task which employed dynamic displays of happy, angry and sad point light facial (PLF) expressions. On each trial, participants moved a slider to manipulate the speed of a PLF stimulus such that it moved at a speed that, in their ‘mind’s eye’, was typical of happy, angry or sad expressions. Results showed that participant...
Consciousness and cognition, 2018
Social conformity is a class of social influence whereby exposure to the attitudes and beliefs of... more Social conformity is a class of social influence whereby exposure to the attitudes and beliefs of a group causes an individual to alter their own attitudes and beliefs towards those of the group. Compliance and acceptance are varieties of social influence distinguished on the basis of the attitude change brought about. Compliance involves public, but not private conformity, while acceptance occurs when group norms are internalised and conformity is demonstrated both in public and in private. Most contemporary paradigms measuring conformity conflate compliance and acceptance, while the few studies to have addressed this issue have done so using between-subjects designs, decreasing their sensitivity. Here we present a novel task which measures compliance and acceptance on a within-subjects basis. Data from a small sample reveal that compliance and acceptance can co-occur, that compliance is increased with an increasing majority, and demonstrate the usefulness of the task for future st...
Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, Nov 1, 2016
Alexithymia is a subclinical condition traditionally characterized by difficulties identifying an... more Alexithymia is a subclinical condition traditionally characterized by difficulties identifying and describing one's own emotions. Recent formulations of alexithymia, however, suggest that the condition may result from a generalized impairment in the perception of all bodily signals ("interoception"). Interoceptive accuracy has been associated with a variety of deficits in social cognition, but recently with an improved ability to inhibit the automatic tendency to imitate the actions of others. The current study tested the consequences for social cognition of the hypothesized association between alexithymia and impaired interoception by examining the relationship between alexithymia and the ability to inhibit imitation. If alexithymia is best characterized as a general interoceptive impairment, then one would predict that alexithymia would have the same relationship with the ability to control imitation as does interoceptive accuracy. Forty-three healthy adults complete...