Nonpharmacological practices are person-centered, and their selection can be informed by considering the cause and meaning of the individual's behavioral and psychological symptoms. Family caregivers and paid care providers can implement evidence-based practices in home or residential care settings, although some practices require the development of more specific protocols if they are to become widely used in an efficacious manner.

Four experiments compared the level of fear conditioned with escapable versus inescapable shock. In Experiments 1 and 2, master subjects that had received 50 unsignaled escapable shocks were less afraid of the situation where the shock had occurred than were yoked subjects that had received inescapable shocks. Comparable results were found in Experiments 3 and 4, which used freezing as an index of fear of a discrete conditioned stimulus (CS) that had been paired with shock. Interestingly, control per se was not necessary to produce the low level of fear seen in the master subjects: Yoked groups receiving a feedback signal at the time the master made an escape response showed a low level of fear that was comparable to that of the masters and significantly less than that seen in the yoked.subjects without feedback. In addition, there were strong suggestions that control and feedback exert their effects through the same or highly similar mechanisms. Possible explanations for how control and the exteroceptive feedback signal produce this effect are discussed.

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and social anxiety disorder (SAD) are both characterized by social dysfunction, but no study to date has compared neural responses to social rewards in ASDs and SAD. Neural responses during social and non-social reward anticipation and outcomes were examined in individuals with ASD (n = 16), SAD (n = 15) and a control group (n = 19) via functional magnetic resonance imaging. Analyses modeling all three groups revealed increased nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation in SAD relative to ASD during monetary reward anticipation, whereas both the SAD and ASD group demonstrated decreased bilateral NAc activation relative to the control group during social reward anticipation. During reward outcomes, the SAD group did not differ significantly from the other two groups in ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation to either reward type. Analyses comparing only the ASD and SAD groups revealed greater bilateral amygdala activation to social rewards in SAD relative to ASD during both anticipation and outcome phases, and the magnitude of left amygdala hyperactivation in the SAD group during social reward anticipation was significantly correlated with the severity of trait anxiety symptoms. Results suggest reward network dysfunction to both monetary and social rewards in SAD and ASD during reward anticipation and outcomes, but that NAc hypoactivation during monetary reward anticipation differentiates ASD from SAD.