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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on January 17, 2009
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2009 4(1):70-78; doi:10.1093/scan/nsn038
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© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Body expressions of emotion do not trigger fear contagion in autism spectrum disorder

Nouchine Hadjikhani1,2,3, Robert M. Joseph4, Dara S. Manoach1,2,5, Paulami Naik1, Josh Snyder1, Kelli Dominick4, Rick Hoge6, Jan Van den Stock7, Helen Tager Flusberg4 and Beatrice de Gelder1,7

1Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, 2Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, 3Brain Mind Institute, EPFL, Switzerland, 4Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, 5Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, USA, 6UNF/CRIUGM, University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada and 7Cognitive and Affective Neurosciences Laboratory, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Although there is evidence of emotion perception deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), research on this topic has been mostly confined to perception of emotions in faces. Using behavioral measures and 3T functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined whether such deficits extend to the perception of bodily expressed emotions. We found that individuals with ASD, in contrast to neurotypical (NT) individuals, did not exhibit a differential pattern of brain activation to bodies expressing fear as compared with emotionally neutral bodies. ASD and NT individuals showed similar patterns of activation in response to bodies engaged in emotionally neutral actions, with the exception of decreased activation in the inferior frontal cortex and the anterior insula in ASD. We discuss these findings in relation to possible abnormalities in a network of cortical and subcortical mechanisms involved in social orienting and emotion contagion. Our data suggest that emotion perception deficits in ASD may be due to compromised processing of the emotional component of observed actions.

Keywords: autism; emotion; functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); bodily expression; amygdala; pulvinar; subcortical processing; mirror neurons system

Correspondence should be addressed to Nouchine Hadjikhani, M.D., Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, 149 13th Street, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA. E-mail: nouchine{at}nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

Received April 10, 2008. Accepted October 9, 2008.


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B. de Gelder
Why bodies? Twelve reasons for including bodily expressions in affective neuroscience
Phil Trans R Soc B, December 12, 2009; 364(1535): 3475 - 3484.
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