Literature revue

1.         In the first article, the primary questions presented revolved around autonomic responses of autistic children to people and objects. The purpose of the first experiment was to see what sort of response autistic children had when locking eyes with a person, specifically their mother, compared to just looking at an inanimate object. The results of this experiment showed that while normal subjects produced larger SCRs when locking eyes with a person rather than a cup, the autistic children generally showed no changes to SCRs when looking at either. In the second experiment, the autistic children were tasked with performing ‘self-stimulatory activities’ to record whether or not the calming nature of these activities would cause reductions in electrodermal activity, therefore bringing down their sympathetic tone to a bearable level. The results showed that the children could be classified into two categories. The type A children showed significant drops in skin conductance levels when performing activities such as immersing their hands in a bowl of dried beans, eating, being wrapped in heavy blankets, and deep pressure massages. Meanwhile, the type B children had very flat responses with either no individual SCRs or SCRs produced by extreme activities. It was hypothesized that these children engage in self-injurious behavior or take more risks in order to produce more autonomic activity. The results of these experiments provide potential explanations for autistic children’s pursuit of self-stimulatory actions. It seems as though the children are trying to regulate their autonomic systems when their arousal levels are too high.

2.         Before I read this article, I knew that autistic children liked to engage in self-stimulatory activities, but I never knew exactly why. I found it fascinating to learn how a damaged amygdala affects a person, from autonomic disturbances like sweating of the palms to things like epileptic seizures focused on the temporal lobe. In the discussion section of the article, there is a part of the text that revolves around a conception that the amygdala plays a vital role in higher level cognition, essentially placing value on different concepts and such. It was interesting to read about how this affects type A and B autistic children when their autonomic systems act different. Type A children have an autonomic system that’s constantly on high alert, seeing everything as significant, which is why they pursue self-stimulatory activities in order to “shut the system off”. Type B children experience the opposite, their autonomic system places nothing as significant, which is why they might pursue potentially self-injurious behavior in order to produce that same sense of significance. The article gave me new insight into why autistic children behave the way they do, even going so far as to provide an explanation as to why autistic children use their peripheral vision in situations where people would normally use their focal vision. The hypothesis suggests that focal vision activates the ventral stream, producing unpleasant autonomic sensations in the amygdala-hypothalamus route. It’s incredible to think how much behavior the amygdala affects, and the vastly different results that can come from a damaged amygdala.

3.         In the second article, the primary questions presented have to do with emotions, and how they can be induced by electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe. The purpose of the study was to analyze the emotional phenomena produced, and to compare variables that could affect the chances of inducing these emotions, including anatomical, pathological, and methodological variables. The results showed that emotional responses (ER) were observed in 30 out of the 74 patients in the study, totaling 79 ERs out of 938 IES. The emotion of fear was observed the most by far, with 24 patients experiencing it in 67 out of 79 ERs. Sadness was observed three times from three patients, and happy-pleasant emotions were observed nine times in two patients, while anger and disgust were never observed. The amygdala was the part of the brain that induced the most ERs, and those responses were always fear. While 52 ERs were recorded for stimulation to the right temporal lobe and only 27 for the left side, the difference was not significant because it came from a total of 572 IESs. These results, along with the variables observed, showed that the probability of observing an emotion, especially fear, was higher in cases without evidence of atrophy of the medial temporal regions. While there were limitations to this study due to limitations like the neurologists’ bias, it was concluded that the medial temporal regions are specifically involved in the expression of fear, and that the amygdala plays a role in the behaviors which communicate and signal potential dangers.

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