Attribution of emotions to body postures: An independent component analysis study of functional connectivity in autism

Abstract

The ability to interpret others' body language is a vital skill that helps us infer their thoughts and emotions. However, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been found to have difficulty in understanding the meaning of people's body language, perhaps leading to an overarching deficit in processing emotions. The current fMRI study investigates the functional connectivity underlying emotion and action judgment in the context of processing body language in high-functioning adolescents and young adults with autism, using an independent components analysis (ICA) of the fMRI time series. While there were no reliable group differences in brain activity, the ICA revealed significant involvement of occipital and parietal regions in processing body actions; and inferior frontal gyrus, superior medial prefrontal cortex, and occipital cortex in body expressions of emotions. In a between-group analysis, participants with autism, relative to typical controls, demonstrated significantly reduced temporal coherence in left ventral premotor cortex and right superior parietal lobule while processing emotions. Participants with ASD, on the other hand, showed increased temporal coherence in left fusiform gyrus while inferring emotions from body postures. Finally, a positive predictive relationship was found between empathizing ability and the brain areas underlying emotion processing in ASD participants. These results underscore the differential role of frontal and parietal brain regions in processing emotional body language in autism.

A theoretical rut: revisiting and critically evaluating the generalized under/over‐connectivity hypothesis of autism

“…Findings from these studies describe the functional organization among nodes of a neural network under different task conditions. As a result, in reviewing this literature, we note that task‐related studies generally fall within one of four task domains: language (Jones, Bandettini, Kenworthy, Case, Milleville et al ., ; Just et al ., ; Radluescu, Minati, Ganeshan, Harrison, Gray et al ., ; Sharda, Midha, Malik, Mukerji & Singh, ; Williams, Cherkassky, Mason, Keller, Minshew et al ., ), Theory of Mind (ToM)/ social information processing (Deshpande, Libero, Sreenivasan, Deshpande & Kana, ; Libero, Stevens & Kana, ; Murphy, Foss‐Feig, Kenworthy, Gaillard & Vaidya, ; Odriozola, Uddin, Lynch, Kochalka, Chen et al ., ; Weisberg, Milleville, Kenworthy, Wallace, Gotts et al ., ), executive functioning (Ambrosino, Bos, van Raalten, Kobussen, van Belle et al ., ; Fitzgerald, Johnson, Kehoe, Bokde, Garavan et al ., 2014), and visual and spatial processing (Barbeau, Lewis, Doyon, Benali, Zeffiro et al ., ; Keehn, Shih, Brenner, Townsend & Müller, ; McGrath, Johnson, Ecker, O'Hanlon, Gill et al ., ; McGrath, Johnson, O'Hanlon, Garavan, Gallagher et al ., ). As such, we review each of the four task domains.…”

“…The theory of mind (ToM) studies typically employ tasks in which participants make attributions about the goals or intentions of characters in situational vignettes (Deshpande et al, 2013;Kana, Uddin, Kenet, Chugani & M€ uller, 2014) or based on their body position (Libero et al, 2014). Findings from these studies are a bit more convergent.…”

“…Findings from these studies are a bit more convergent. That is, studies using ToM paradigms tend to report weak connectivity between temporal regions in autism (Deshpande et al, 2013;Libero et al, 2014, Lombardo, Chakrabarti, Bullmore, Sadek, Pasco et al, 2010. For example, one study reported weaker connectivity between the right lateral fusiform (including the FFA) and the right pSTS and amygdala in autism participants compared to controls while viewing social vignettes involving abstract geometric shapes (Weisberg et al, 2014).…”

How face blurring affects body language processing of static gestures in women and men

“…Recent electrophysiological studies ( Proverbio et al , 2014 , 2015 ) have shown how it is possible to investigate the semantic comprehension of body language signals by contrasting the perception of mimics that are congruently or incongruently labeled. Although it has long been known that facial expressions convey a broad and rich spectrum of information about the others’ emotional and mental states, recent findings demonstrate that body language alone can also convey the emotional states of others ( Slaughter et al , 2004 ; Libero et al , 2014 ; De Gelder et al , 2015 ) being, e.g. able to reveal a deceptive or threatening attitude ( Grèzes et al , 2004 ; Sinke et al , 2010 ).…”

CEPP: Perceiving the Emotional State of the User Based on Body Posture

“…However, recent studies have indicated that body posture and movement present specific information about one's emotional state [7][8][9]. Furthermore, research using computational resources to automatically determine the emotional condition based on body posture has not been widely conducted.…”