Do you know how I feel?

With only 2 days left (almost to the hour) before I am sitting across a table from a panel of interviewers, I know I can only retain so much information in my head at such short notice. As such, this will be my last article in preparation for the interview. I have covered all of the most important bases, I think. Mirror neurons in normal / autistic individuals. Emotional contagion in normal individual and today I will write about the research into emotional contagion in autistic folks. In addition to this list, I have a good basic understanding of what Vera is working on, which may come in handy if I'm asked any questions about my current research. After I'm done with this, it will be a case of fierce revision and working out roughly what I would say to the important questions.

"What would you say is your biggest weakness, James?" - "Interview technique. Everything else is brilliant... Promise."

Readers of yesterday's article will know that there is a lot of research yet very few firm conclusions as to how mirror neuron systems contribute towards autism. Southgate and Hamilton (2008) made a series of convincing arguments to suggest that the "broken mirrors" theory of autism was as of yet poorly supported, despite the number of researchers which had taken it on board. The theory relied upon Lacoboni et al.'s (1999) concept of direct-matching, suggesting that autistic individuals had impaired mirror neurons and that explained their less-than-average imitation abilities (e.g. Williams et al. 2004). The problem that S & H found with this, was that there was plenty of research showing autistic children could imitate just fine if they were specifically instructed to do so (Bird et al. 2007). Pretty much all MN research of the direct-matching sort involves participants being instructed to imitate, or to actively observe a specific action, so obviously involuntary 'automatic' imitation isn't required to exhibit the direct-matching system. Indeed automatic imitation fits under the mimicry mechanism of emotional contagion, with which direct-matching has an association but perhaps not direct control (Myself, a couple of days ago). S & H concluded that it was more likely that other characteristic traits of autism (lack of eye contact, less interest in infant-directed speech etc.) make it harder for autistic people to understand when and what to imitate.

Emotional contagion, according to Hatfield et al. (1993), occurs via two overlapping main mechanisms: mimicry and feedback. Mimicry describes the tendency for humans, even from infancy, to automatically copy the facial expressions (Dimberg, 1982), vocal speed and styles (Webb, 1972), and posture (LeFrance, 1979) amongst other physical expressive movements. Before the term was even coined, Condon and Ogston (1966) performed an experiment using high speed cameras to show that his college students would begin to automatically imitate their companions within 21msecs. Muhammed Ali, who was famous for his reaction times, could only manage a conscious reaction within 190msecs of a light cue. Mimicry, then, is a well established automatic reaction to emotional information displayed by a partner in interaction, whether it be direct or via TV etc. Many researchers have supported the evolutionary view, that automatic mimicry is an adaptation to allow us to build up rapport and familiarity with greater ease. Lakin and Chartrand (2003) showed that participants desire to be friends with a person correlated with the instances of automatic mimicry during their interaction. Additionally, individuals who had tried, and failed, to build a rapport with one person show more mimicry than those who have previously succeeded.

Feedback, the second process, makes use of mimicry. The brain notices that the expression/ tone of voice / posture is one of X emotion, so it thinks "oh, well I must be feeling X emotion then". Feedback is a matter of external then internal, rather than the other way around. Evidence for it comes from Laird and Bresler (1992) who found that manipulating participants' expressions did infact influence their self-reports of emotional state. Physiological evidence came from Ekman et al. (1983) who found similar responses in participants' autonomous nervous system when either internally summoning up and emotion or making the corresponding facial expression.

"Make yourself look really angry, then tell me how you feel." Try it yourself and let me know if it works.

So how do automatic mimicry and feedback processes differ in autistic individuals? I.e. do they experience emotional contagion in the same way? McIntosh et al. (2006) believed that as mimicry was fundamental to communication and social factors, it was likely that there would be some level of impairment. They examined automatic mimicry of facial expressions in autistic and non-autistic adults (matched as much as possible in all other attirbutes). There was no automatic mimicry in the autistic group at all. It did not occur, whilst it did in the non-autistic group at expected levels. Supporting Southgate and Hamilton's (2008) criticisms of the broken mirrors theory, voluntary imitation was not inhibited in either group. Beall et al. (2008) used electromyography (EMG) to check skeletal movements in the face showing changes in expressions. Between the years of 7-12 typically developing children showed automatic mimicry of happy, angry and even fear in response to the angry faces. (within 1000msecs of stimuli presentation). Autistic children betwene 8 and 13 showed no mimicry to fear, and inconsistent-but-low responses to happy or angry. Though older children had significantly more responses than younger, suggesting some development even if it is delayed. Hajikhani et al. (2007) and Dapretto et al. (2006) are two examples out of many, that have shown physical abnormalities in face-perception areas of the brain for both neutral and expressive faces.

There are far more examples of facial imitation deficits than in body posture or vocal style for autistic individuals, oddly. In fact there seems to be a series of arguments being made as to why posture mimicry should be studied as with typically developing individuals, but no studies existed that I had access to today. Disappointing, but the evidence above stands to show there are real known problems in mimicry. Indeed, there is some research into developing teaching methods to enable autistic children to learn to automatically imitate better (e.g. Ingersoll and Schreibman (2006). Something that may be related, is the evidence showing autistic individuals do not seem to experience contagious yawning! Senju et al. (2007) showed autistic and non-autistic children videos of people yawning in their experiment, and reported significantly less yawns in the autistic group both during and after the videos. Curious!

As for emotional feedback, impairment of that stems from more than just automatic processing difficulties. In typically developing people, feedback can be induced automatically or voluntarily. In autistic folks, according to Stel, Heuvel and Smeets (2008), it cannot be induced via either method. Unlike McIntosh et al.'s (2006) study they used visible automatic mimicry to judge to first conditions. Participants were videotaped by a hidden camera whilst they watched a video of a man talking about his adventures in a theme park and displaying happy expressions. Participants were then asked to rate their emotions when watching on a simple series of Likert scales. As expected, autistic children failed to display automatic mimicry. This procedure was repeated for the next test, but participants were directly asked to imitate expressions they saw. The results? Autistic individuals showed no significant emotional feedback through either of the studies, whilst typically developing individuals did. The self report measures weren't perfect for tracking emotional change, which is where neurological studies come in. There are numerous studies explaining the complex nature of emotion and the brain, and many to do with autism. Problem is none of them specifically relate to facial feedback that I have found. I will leave this door closed for the time-being, as there is such a thing as learning too much for an examination.

I typed "emotional feedback" into google image search, and this was one of the first results. Brilliant.

So, a brief summary. Autistic individuals display next to no automatic mimicry at all. Their voluntary mimicry is perfectly fine, but they do not recieve emotional feedback from (at least) their own facial expressions during either type of mimicry. All in all, emotional contagion is a highly impaired system for autistic folks and must have a very serious impact on their social lives given that EC seems to be an evolutionary adaptation allowing us to familiarise and affiliate ourselves with each other.

This has been my last study based interview-preparation article. I hope you've enjoyed the series as much as I have! Tomorrow is my last day to ready myself, and I will be studying what I have written and getting it as clear in my head as possible. It is quite likely I will write a brief final post about my last minute choices!

Thanks for reading.