Brain Scan Might Someday Spot Autism

A type of brain imaging that measures the circuitry of brain connections may someday be used to diagnose autism, new research suggests. Researchers at McLean Hospital in Boston and the University of Utah used MRIs to analyze the microscopic fiber structures that make up the brain circuitry in 30 males aged 8 to 26 with high-functioning autism and 30 males without autism. Males with autism showed differences in the white matter circuitry in two regions of the brain's temporal lobe: the superior temporal gyrus and the temporal stem. Those areas are involved with language, emotion and social skills, according to the researchers.

Based on the deviations in brain circuitry, researchers could distinguish with 94 percent accuracy those who had autism and those who didn't. Currently, there is no biological test for autism. Instead, diagnosis is done through a lengthy examination involving questions about the child's behavior, language and social functioning. The MRI test could change that, though the study authors cautioned that the results are preliminary and need to be confirmed with larger numbers of patients.

"Our study pinpoints disruptions in the circuitry in a brain region that has been known for a long time to be responsible for language, social and emotional functioning, which are the major deficits in autism," said lead author Nicholas Lange, director of the Neurostatistics Laboratory at McLean Hospital and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "If we can get to the physical basis of the potential sources of those deficits, we can better understand how exactly it's happening and what we can do to develop more effective treatments."

Anger Focuses Attention on Rewards, Not Threats: Study

Even though anger is a negative emotion, angry people tend to pay more attention to rewards than threats, a new study finds. Previous research has found that people with other types of negative emotions, such as fea or anxiety, tend to focus more on threat than reward. For example, they'll spend more time looking at a picture of a person holding a knife threateningly than a picture of a sexy couple. On the other hand, people experiencing a positive emotion such as excitement are drawn to rewards, explained Brett Q. Ford, of Boston College, and colleagues. "Emotions can vary in what they make you want to do. Fear is associated with a motivation to avoid, whereas excitement is associated with a motivation to approach.

It can make you want to seek out certain things, like rewards," Ford said in an Association for Psychological Science news release. In the study, volunteers were asked to write for 15 minutes about one of four personal memories, and were assigned to write about a time when they were angry, afraid, excited/happy, or felt little or no emotion. Depending on the emotion the participant had been assigned, a five-minute piece of music was played to reinforce the feeling.After completing the writing task, the volunteers were asked to look at two side-by-side pictures. The investigators used a device that monitors eye movement to determine how much time the volunteers spent focusing on each picture.

They found that volunteers who had been assigned to recall an angry memory spent more time looking at rewarding pictures, as did the people who recalled feeling happy and excited. The findings suggest that visual attention may not be related to negative versus positive emotions, but instead related to how a person's emotions motivate them. For example, anger might motivate someone to approach something in an aggressive way, while happiness might cause someone to want to approach things in a social or friendly way, the study authors noted in the news release. "Attention kicks off an entire string of events that can end up influencing behavior," the authors concluded in the news release. The study findings were released online in advance of publication in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science.