Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the "Wild Things Are" was investigated as a means of emotion recognition in preschool children. Sixty-six children and 60 adults participated in two tasks. The first was a book task, requiring identification of emotions in three target pictures, in three conditions. The visual condition presented the…

According to the seductive details (SD) effect, interesting, but irrelevant information in learning materials reduces learning outcomes. Basic research suggests that subjects in positive mood are more distractible by task-irrelevant stimuli than subjects in negative mood. Hence, mood could moderate the SD effect. We tested this assumption by…

Typically developing adults with low and high Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores made rapid social evaluations of neutral faces when these were primed by briefly presented emotional faces. High AQ participants rated neutral faces as more threatening than low AQ participants, regardless of the prime condition. Both groups rated target neutral…

Perceptual narrowing occurs in human infants for other-race faces. A paired-comparison task measuring infant looking time was used to investigate the hypothesis that adding emotional expressiveness to other-race faces would help infants break through narrowing and reinstate other-race face recognition. Experiment 1 demonstrated narrowing for White…

In this study, children with learning disability (LD) were compared with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in terms of identifying emotions from photographs with certain face and body expressions. The sample consisted of a total of 82 children aged 7-19 years living in Izmir in Turkey. A total of 6 separate sets of slides, consisting of…

There is equivocal evidence as to whether there is a deficit in recognising emotional expressions in Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study compared emotion recognition in ASD in three types of emotion expression media (still image, dynamic image, auditory) across human stimuli (e.g. photo of a human face) and animated stimuli (e.g. cartoon…

Tactile defensiveness, characterized by behavioral hyperresponsiveness and negative emotional responses to touch, is a common manifestation of aberrant sensory processing in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and other developmental disabilities (DD). Variations in tactile defensiveness with the properties of the stimulus and the bodily site of…

Current textbooks, websites, research articles, and popular resources have stated that gifted individuals have longer and more pronounced responses to stimuli than the general population. This overexcitable nature of gifted persons has provided a commonly used lens to conceptualize, identify, and understand giftedness and gifted persons'…

The placebo effect is any outcome that is not attributed to a specific treatment but rather to an individual's mindset (Benson & Friedman, 1996). This phenomenon can extend beyond its typical use in pharmaceutical drugs to involve aspects of everyday life, such as the effect of sleep on cognitive functioning. In 2 studies examining whether…

The affective responses to another person's condition depend on the ability to reflect about another's thoughts and intentions. This is relevant also for high-functioning individuals with ASD who have considerable difficulties in reading the intentions of others. With the present study we introduce a novel paradigm to induce vicarious…

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between explicit and implicit forms of Theory of Mind reasoning and to test the influence of experience on implicit Theory of Mind reasoning in individuals with autism spectrum disorders and in neurotypical adults. Results from two standard explicit Theory of Mind tasks are mixed: Individuals with…

Background: Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in children and adolescents, and are associated with aberrant emotion-related attention orienting and inhibitory control. While recent studies conducted with high-trait anxious adults have employed novel emotion-modified antisaccade tasks to examine the influence of emotional information on…

While most studies of emotion recognition in Asperger's Syndrome (AS) have focused solely on the verbal decoding of affective states, the current research employed the novel technique of using both nonverbal matching and verbal labeling tasks to examine the decoding of emotional body postures and facial expressions. AS participants performed…

Background: Although a general consensus holds that emotional reactivity in youth with conduct disorder (CD) symptoms arises as one of the main causes of successive aggression, it remains to be determined whether automatic emotional processing is altered in this population. Methods: We measured auditory event-related potentials (ERP) in 20 young…

This study investigated the specific emotional lexicons in narratives created by persons diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) to test the hypothesis that individuals with ASPD exhibit deficiencies in emotional language. Study participants consisted of 60 prison inmates with ASPD, 40 prison inmates without ASPD, and 60 men without…