Autism, Anxiety, and the Amygdala: an fMRI Study of Emotion Learning in Autism and Typical Development
Mikle South,
Psychology
The purpose of this study is to explore how induced anxiety affects simple association learning, in a group of individuals diagnosed with autism relative to a healthy comparison group, and using multiple physiological measures related to amygdala activity. Specific study aims are to identify the contributions of
autism severity relative to
anxiety severity, to arousal and learning 1) during a classical conditioning (associative learning) task which uses a startling air blast to the neck as the unconditioned stimulus and 2) in the classical conditioning task, in response to socially-relevant (e.g., photographs of angry faces) versus non-social (e.g., photographs of houses) stuimuli.
