Skip Navigation



Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access published online on April 26, 2007
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:10.1093/scan/nsm010
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
2/2/140    most recent
nsm010v1
Right arrow E-letters: Submit a response
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me when E-letters are posted
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Request Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Pelphrey, K. A.
Right arrow Articles by LaBar, K. S.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by Pelphrey, K. A.
Right arrow Articles by LaBar, K. S.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Perception of dynamic changes in facial affect and identity in autism

Kevin A. Pelphrey1,2, James P. Morris2, Gregory McCarthy3 and Kevin S. LaBar1,4

1Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, 2Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University, 3Department of Psychology, Yale University, and 4Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University

Despite elegant behavioral descriptions of abnormalities for processing emotional facial expressions and biological motion in autism, identification of the neural mechanisms underlying these abnormalities remains a critical and largely unmet challenge. We compared brain activity with dynamic and static facial expressions in participants with and without high-functioning autism using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and three classes of face stimuli—emotion morphs (fearful and angry), identity morphs and static images (fearful, angry and neutral). We observed reduced activity in the amygdala (AMY) and fusiform gyrus (FFG) to dynamic emotional expressions in people with autism. There was also a lack of modulation by dynamic compared with static emotional expressions of social brain regions including the AMY, posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) region and FFG. We observed equivalent emotion and identity morph-evoked activity in participants with and without autism in a region corresponding to the expected location of the more generally motion-sensitive area MT or V5. We conclude that dysfunctions in key components of the human face processing system including the AMY, FFG and posterior STS region are present in individuals with high-functioning autism, and this dysfunction might contribute to the deficits in processing emotional facial expressions.

Keywords: autism; amygdala; emotion; face processing; fMRI

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Kevin A. Pelphrey, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, 9 Flowers Drive, Durham, North Carolina, 27708-0086, USA. E-mail: kevin.pelphrey{at}duke.edu

Received December 24, 2006. Accepted March 22, 2007.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.