During the proposed period of training the candidate plans to develop research expertise in the area of affective neuroscience and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and to apply these methods to the study of autism. Training will take place primarily in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine and be achieved through completion of neuroscience and neuroimaging coursework, through completion of a behavioral and fMRI research study involving individuals with autism, and through interactions with a supervisory committee of psychologists and neuroscientists. Autism and related disorders are characterized by primary deficits in social and communication skills, which may arise from difficulties in attending to and interpreting social-emotional cues. Using a theoretical framework provided by the field of affective neuroscience, the proposed project will investigate 1) the influence of unconscious, preattentive emotion processing on the conscious evaluation of emotional stimuli and 2) the influence of implicit emotion processing on voluntary attention. It is hypothesized that deficits in automatic emotion processing characterize adults with autism spectrum disorders, leading to atypical patterns of voluntary evaluation and attention. Study participants will complete various tasks designed specifically for this study. Task performance of individuals with autism spectrum disorders will be compared to that of two control groups, including a group of individuals with fragile X syndrome and a group of individuals without a diagnosis. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies will be conducted to define the hemodynamic responses to emotion processing and compare these responses across groups. As a vehicle for training, a neurocognitive model of emotion processing in autism will be tested and reformulated by these studies.
| Ousley, O Y; Smearman, E; Fernandez-Carriba, S et al. (2013) Axis I psychiatric diagnoses in adolescents and young adults with 22q11 deletion syndrome. Eur Psychiatry 28:417-22 |
