No abstract

Although Schizophrenia (SCZ) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) share impairments in emotion recognition, the mechanisms underlying these impairments may differ. The current study used the novel "Emotions in Context" task to examine how the interpretation and visual inspection of facial affect is modulated by congruent and incongruent emotional contexts in SCZ and ASD. Both adults with SCZ (n= 44) and those with ASD (n= 21) exhibited reduced affect recognition relative to typically-developing (TD) controls (n= 39) when faces were integrated within broader emotional scenes but not when they were presented in isolation, underscoring the importance of using stimuli that better approximate real-world contexts. Additionally, viewing faces within congruent emotional scenes improved accuracy and visual attention to the face for controls more so than the clinical groups, suggesting that individuals with SCZ and ASD may not benefit from the presence of complementary emotional information as readily as controls. Despite these similarities, important distinctions between SCZ and ASD were found. In every condition, IQ was related to emotion-recognition accuracy for the SCZ group but not for the ASD or TD groups. Further, only the ASD group failed to increase their visual attention to faces in incongruent emotional scenes, suggesting a lower reliance on facial information within ambiguous emotional contexts relative to congruent ones. Collectively, these findings highlight both shared and distinct social cognitive processes in SCZ and ASD that may contribute to their characteristic social disabilities.

These findings suggest that amygdala hyperactivation may underlie paranoia in schizophrenia. Additionally, the reported differences between paranoid and nonparanoid patient volunteers emphasize the importance of considering symptom-based subgroups and baseline levels of activity in future investigations of neural activation in schizophrenia.

Surface melting impacts ice sheet sliding by supplying water to the bed, but subglacial processes driving ice accelerations are complex. We examine linkages between surface runoff, transient subglacial water storage, and short‐term ice motion from 168 consecutive hourly measurements of meltwater discharge (moulin input) and GPS‐derived ice surface motion for Rio Behar, a ∼60 km2 moulin‐terminating supraglacial river catchment on the southwest Greenland Ice Sheet. Short‐term accelerations in ice speed correlate strongly with lag‐corrected measures of supraglacial river discharge (r = 0.9, τ = 0.7, p < 0.01). Though our 7 days record cannot address seasonal‐scale forcing, diurnal ice accelerations align with normalized differenced supraglacial and proglacial discharge, a proxy for subglacial storage change, better than GPS‐derived ice surface uplift. These observations counter theoretical steady state basal sliding laws and suggest that moulin and proglacially induced fluctuations in subglacial water storage, rather than absolute subglacial water storage, drive short‐term ice accelerations.