Humans are social beings and the ability to recognise emotions in other people is fundamental to mental health.
Children with autism and a virulent form of aggressive conduct problems show similar and fundamental problems in recognising emotions.
A fundamental problem for both children with autism spectrum disorders and children with conduct disorder have difficulty recognising what other people are feeling, possibly related to lack of attention to the eyes.
It is not know whether the similar behaviour in these two conditions arises from different types of neuro-developmental abnormalities. We will be studying the brain activity in children aged 8-18 with autism spectrum disorder, children with conduct problems and healthy controls while they identify different facial emotions.
We will compare performance when attention is explicitly directed towards the eyes and when it is not.
Our goal is the examine the brain regions underlying these fundamental deficits in emotion recognition in children with autism and conduct problems, and how they diverge from normally developing participants.
