No abstract

Objective Network analysis allows us to identify the most interconnected (i.e., central) symptoms, and multiple authors have suggested that these symptoms might be important treatment targets. This is because change in central symptoms (relative to others) should have greater impact on change in all other symptoms. It has been argued that networks derived from cross-sectional data may help identify such important symptoms. We tested this hypothesis in social anxiety disorder. Method We first estimated a state-of-the-art regularized partial correlation network based on participants with social anxiety disorder (N = 910) to determine which symptoms were more central. Next, we tested whether change in these central symptoms were indeed more related to overall symptom change in a separate dataset of participants with social anxiety disorder who underwent a variety of treatments (N = 244). We also tested whether relatively superficial item properties (infrequency of endorsement and variance of items) might account for any effects shown for central symptoms. Results Centrality indices successfully predicted how strongly changes in items correlated with change in the remainder of the items. Findings were limited to the measure used in the network and did not generalize to three other measures related to social anxiety severity. In contrast, infrequency of endorsement showed associations across all measures. Conclusions The transfer of recently published results from cross-sectional network analyses to treatment data is unlikely to be straightforward.

Diminished social motivation constitutes one of the core impairments of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and is thought to have a strong impact on the way individuals with autism respond to the presence of others. In this study, we hypothesized that experimental contexts involving direct interaction with an experimenter might elicit different reactions in ASD and thus act as a potential confound in the interpretation of group differences during social cognitive tests. Following classic work in social psychology on the ‘audience effect’ –wherein individuals act differently when they are being watched in a more or less conscious attempt to enhance their reputation in the eyes of others, we reasoned that social contexts are indeed likely to produce an increase in performance in typically developing (TD) individuals but that children with ASD would be less susceptible to such audience effects. More specifically, we were interested in testing the idea that susceptibility to the audience effect might explain part of the performance gap between children with and without autism in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks, which are typically administered by a human experimenter. We tested this hypothesis by comparing performance on a ToM task administered in a social vs. a non-social setting. We found that ASDs and controls performed similarly when the task was administered using a non-social medium. However, control participants outperformed children with autism when an experimenter administered the task. Thus, TD controls demonstrated a relative improvement in performance when in the presence of an experimenter that children with ASD did not. The implications of this diminished ‘audience effect’ in ASD are discussed.

Although the extant literature on face recognition skills in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) shows clear impairments compared to typically developing controls (TDC) at the group level, the distribution of scores within ASD is broad. In the present research, we take a dimensional approach and explore how differences in social attention during an eye tracking experiment correlate with face recognition skills across ASD and TDC. Emotional discrimination and person identity perception face processing skills were assessed using the Let's Face It! Skills Battery in 110 children with and without ASD. Social attention was assessed using infrared eye gaze tracking during passive viewing of movies of facial expressions and objects displayed together on a computer screen. Face processing skills were significantly correlated with measures of attention to faces and with social skills as measured by the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ). Consistent with prior research, children with ASD scored significantly lower on face processing skills tests but, unexpectedly, group differences in amount of attention to faces (vs. objects) were not found. We discuss possible methodological contributions to this null finding. We also highlight the importance of a dimensional approach for understanding the developmental origins of reduced face perception skills, and emphasize the need for longitudinal research to truly understand how social motivation and social attention influence the development of social perceptual skills.

Background and Objectives: Psychological inflexibility exhibits across multiple facets of functioning, including thinking styles, personality, cognitive shifting, emotion, and physiology, with many of these manifestations showing associations with depression. As such, these facets might be part of an overarching latent construct of psychological inflexibility that explains associations with depression. We predicted that (1) five facets of inflexibility (perseverative thinking, personality rigidity, attention-shifting, negative emotional inertia, and low respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity) would load onto a unique latent construct of psychological inflexibility. Further, we hypothesized this latent construct of psychological inflexibility would be (2) significantly associated with higher depression; and (3) associated with depression to a greater extent than anxious arousal.Methods: Seventy-five adult community participants completed measures assessing the five indices of inflexibility and self-report measures of depression and anxious arousal.Results: Structural equation modeling identified a latent inflexibility construct reflected by perseverative thinking, personality rigidity, and emotional inertia, but did not include attentionshifting or RSA reactivity. The inflexibility construct was positively associated with depression and anxious arousal, but more strongly associated with depression than with anxious arousal.