Functional and dysfunctional brain circuits underlying emotional processing of music in autism spectrum disorders (original) (raw)
Related papers
Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2014
Music is a potent source for eliciting emotions, but not everybody experience emotions in the same way. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show difficulties with social and emotional cognition. Impairments in emotion recognition are widely studied in ASD, and have been associated with atypical brain activation in response to emotional expressions in faces and speech. Whether these impairments and atypical brain responses generalize to other domains, such as emotional processing of music, is less clear. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated neural correlates of emotion recognition in music in high-functioning adults with ASD and neurotypical adults. Both groups engaged similar neural networks during processing of emotional music, and individuals with ASD rated emotional music comparable to the group of neurotypical individuals. However, in the ASD group, increased activity in response to happy compared to sad music was observed in dorsolateral prefrontal regions and in the rolandic operculum/insula, and we propose that this reflects increased cognitive processing and physiological arousal in response to emotional musical stimuli in this group.
Music: a unique window into the world of autism
Understanding emotions is fundamental to our ability to navigate the complex world of human social interaction. Individualswith autism spectrum disorders(ASD) experience difficultieswith the communication and understanding of emotions within the social domain. Their ability to interpret other people’s nonverbal, facial, and bodily expressions of emotion is strongly curtailed. However, there is evidence to suggest that many individuals with ASD show a strong and early preference for music and are able to understand simple and complex musical emotions in childhood and adulthood. The dissociation between emotion recognition abilities in musical and social domains in individuals with ASD provides us with the opportunity to consider the nature of emotion processing difficulties characterizing this disorder. There has recently been a surge of interest in musical abilities in individuals with ASD, and this has motivated new behavioral and neuroimaging studies.Here, we review this new work.We conclude by providing some questions for future directions.
Neural Correlates Of Music And Emotion In Asd And Typical Children
2017
Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by a delay in expressing and<br> interpreting other emotions as well as having difficulties with social abilities. It<br> covers a very broad range of diagnosis and it affects 1% of the world population,<br> the differences between the various types are not well defined and the reason behind<br> this disease is not well understood. Therefore, studies such as this are being<br> carried out towards better comprehending and explaining the unknown of this disease.<br> In this work, a group of ASD children and a group of typical children were<br> observed by recording their EEG signal and verbal answers while they were exposed<br> to audio-visual stimuli with an emotional character and were asked to identify such<br> emotion. First, correlation between EEG features and verbal and expected response<br> was computed to confirm EEG may be used to interpret emotions. This was confirm...
Emotion Perception in Music in High-Functioning Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorders
2011
Abstract Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) succeed at a range of musical tasks. The ability to recognize musical emotion as belonging to one of four categories (happy, sad, scared or peaceful) was assessed in high-functioning adolescents with ASD (N= 26) and adolescents with typical development (TD, N= 26) with comparable performance IQ, auditory working memory, and musical training and experience.
Brain Sciences
The Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by a difficulty in expressing and interpreting others’ emotions. In particular, people with ASD have difficulties when interpreting emotions encoded in facial expressions. In the past, music interventions have been shown to improve autistic individuals’ emotional and social skills. The present study describes a pilot study to explore the usefulness of music as a tool for improving autistic children’s emotion recognition in facial expressions. Twenty-five children (mean age = 8.8 y, SD = 1.24) with high-functioning ASD and normal hearing participated in the study consisting of four weekly sessions of 15 min each. Twenty-five participants were randomly divided into an experimental group (N = 14) and a control group (N = 11). During each session, participants in the experimental group were exposed to images of facial expressions for four emotions (happy, sad, angry, and fear). Images were shown in three conditions, with the second c...
Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2014
EMOTION PERCEPTION DEFICITS ARE COMMONLY observed in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Numerous studies have documented deficits in emotional recognition of social stimuli among those with ASD, such as faces and voices, while far fewer have investigated emotional recognition of nonsocial stimuli in this population. In this study, participants with ASD and a comparison group of typically developing (TD) control participants listened to song clips that varied in levels of pleasantness (valence) and arousal. Participants then rated emotions they felt or perceived in the music, using a list of eight emotion words for each song. Results showed that individuals with ASD gave significantly lower ratings of negative emotions in both the felt and perceived categories compared to TD controls, but did not show significant differences in ratings of positive emotions. These findings suggest that deficits in processing emotions in music among those with ASD may be valence specific.
Can children with autistic spectrum disorders perceive affect in music? An experimental …
Psychological Medicine, 1999
Background. Children with autistic spectrum disorders typically show impairments in processing affective information within social and interpersonal domains. It has yet to be established whether such difficulties persist in the area of music ; a domain which is characteristically rich in emotional content. Methods. Fourteen children with autism and Asperger syndrome and their age and intelligence matched controls were tested for their ability to identify the affective connotations of melodies in the major or minor musical mode. They were required to match musical fragments with schematic representations of happy and sad faces. Results. The groups did not differ in their ability to ascribe the musical examples to the two affective categories. Conclusions. In contrast to their performance within social and interpersonal domains, children with autistic disorders showed no deficits in processing affect in musical stimuli.
Autism, emotion recognition and the mirror neuron system: the case of music
McGill journal of medicine : MJM : an international forum for the advancement of medical sciences by students, 2009
Understanding emotions is fundamental to our ability to navigate and thrive in a complex world of human social interaction. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are known to experience difficulties with the communication and understanding of emotion, such as the nonverbal expression of emotion and the interpretation of emotions of others from facial expressions and body language. These deficits often lead to loneliness and isolation from peers, and social withdrawal from the environment in general. In the case of music however, there is evidence to suggest that individuals with ASD do not have difficulties recognizing simple emotions. In addition, individuals with ASD have been found to show normal and even superior abilities with specific aspects of music processing, and often show strong preferences towards music. It is possible these varying abilities with different types of expressive communication may be related to a neural system referred to as the mirror neuron sy...
It has been assumed that the social deficits inherent in autism imply that individuals with the condition will be unable fully to appreciate the emotional content of music. My aim was to test this assumption, and to explore more widely the similarities and differences between the experience of music in the normal population and those with autism. My first study used musically-induced mood changes and a behavioural measure to show that mood music has measurable effects on cognitive processes in a control group. The second study focused on high-functioning adults on the autism spectrum, using semi-structured interviews to investigate the part that music plays in their everyday lives, concluding that autism is no bar to a full appreciation of the emotional uses of music, though also suggesting a degree of impoverishment in the language they use to describe the emotions. The final set of experiments compared control and autism groups directly, using physiological (GSR) measures of arousal together with self-report of the emotions evoked by a set of musical items. Standardized questionnaires were employed to measure alexithymia (difficulty in identifying and describing feelings) in individuals. Although the autism group experienced comparable levels of physiological arousal to music, they used fewer words than controls to describe their emotional responses, a difference which correlated strongly with their level of alexithymia. My results are consistent with the hypothesis that in autism, the basic physiological and emotional component of their reactivity to music is functioning normally, but their ability to translate these reactions into conventional emotional language is reduced, in line with their degree of alexithymia. These results suggest that the preserved ability of music to generate emotional arousal in autism may lead to clinical applications for the treatment of alexithymia in autism and other conditions.
Background. Children with autistic spectrum disorders typically show impairments in processing affective information within social and interpersonal domains. It has yet to be established whether such difficulties persist in the area of music; a domain which is characteristically rich in emotional content. Methods. Fourteen children with autism and Asperger syndrome and their age and intelligence matched controls were tested for their ability to identify the affective connotations of melodies in the major or minor musical mode. They were required to match musical fragments with schematic representations of happy and sad faces. Results. The groups did not differ in their ability to ascribe the musical examples to the two affective categories. Conclusions. In contrast to their performance within social and interpersonal domains, children with autistic disorders showed no deficits in processing affect in musical stimuli.