Robot is Helping Autistic Children with their Social Skills

"This is nice, it tickles me," Kaspar the social robot tells four-year-old Finn as they play together at an autism school north of London.

Kaspar, developed by the University of Hertfordshire, also sings song, imitates eating, plays the tambourine and combs his hair during their sessions aimed at helping Finn with his social interaction and communication.

Finn is one of around 170 autistic children that Kaspar has helped in a handful of schools and hospitals over the last 10 years.

But with approximately 700,000 people in Britain on the autism spectrum, according to the National Autistic Society who will mark ‘World Autism Day’ on Sunday, the university wants Kaspar to help more people.

"Our vision is that every child in a school or a home or in a hospital could get a Kaspar if they wanted to," Kerstin Dautenhahn, professor of artificial
intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire, told Reuters.



Achieving that goal will largely depend on the results of a two-year clinical trial with the Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust, which, if successful, could see Kaspar working in hospitals nationwide.

TRACKS, an independent charity and specialist early years center for children with autism in Stevenage, have seen positive results from working with Kaspar, who sports a blue cap and plaid shirt for play sessions.

"We were trying to teach a little boy how to eat with his peers. He usually struggled with it because of his anxiety issues," said deputy principal Alice Lynch.

"We started doing it with Kaspar and he really, really enjoyed feeding Kaspar, making him eat when he was hungry, things like that. Now he's started to integrate into the classroom and eat alongside his peers. So things like that, are just a massive progression."



Many children with autism find it hard to decipher basic human communication and emotion so Kaspar's designers avoided making him too lifelike and instead opted for simplified, easy to process features.

Autism support groups have been impressed.

"Many autistic people are drawn to technology, particularly the predictability it provides, which means it can be a very useful means of engaging children, and adults too," Carol Povey, director of the National Autistic Society's Centre for Autism, told Reuters.

"This robot is one of a number of emerging technologies which have the potential to make a huge difference to people on the autism spectrum."

Source: Fox News, Health

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Genetics Play a Role in Social Anxiety Disorder, Study Finds

The serotonin transporter gene “SLC6A4” is linked to social anxiety disorder.

Researchers at the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Bonn in Germany recently discovered that a specific serotonin transporter gene called “SLC6A4” is strongly correlated with someone's odds of suffering from social anxiety disorder (SAD). The initial findings of this research were published online ahead of print March 9 in the journal Psychiatric Genetics.

Social anxiety disorder (or social phobia) is a common and heritable psychiatric disorder that is driven by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Until now, genetic studies on SAD have been rare. According to the researchers, "This is the largest association study so far into social phobia."
For this study the German’s researcher genotyped 321 patients with SAD and 804 controls without social phobia. Then, they carried out a single-marker analysis to identify a quantitative association between SAD and avoidance behaviors. Their results provide evidence that the serotonin transporter gene SLC6A4 is frequently correlated with anxiety-related traits.

Notably, selective-serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are often prescribed to treat depression and anxiety disorders. SSRIs are believed to target the serotonin transporter gene SLC6A4.



People with social anxiety tend to avoid larger groups and situations in which they fearbeing judged by others. SAD is marked by symptoms such as increased heart rate, sweaty palms, shakiness, shortness of breath, etc.

The physiological discomfort of social anxiety reinforces avoidance behaviors and a withdrawal from face-to-face social contact. The fear of social encounters can lead to isolation and loneliness that snowballs. Unfortunately, people with social anxiety who rely excessively on social media to maintain a sense of connectedness may actually exacerbate their feelings of perceived social isolation, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine.

In 1948, when Maurice M. Rapport first isolated the chemical serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) in the human body and brain, serotonin was initially classified as a “serum agent that affected vascular tone.” Today, serotonin is commonly viewed as a neurotransmitter that helps to maintain mood balance.

Although there is a strong link between serotonin, depression, and social anxiety disorders; scientists remain uncertain about which comes first in terms of driving the correlation vs. causation dynamic between serotonin and psychiatric disorders. For example: Do low levels of serotonin contribute to social anxiety or does social phobia trigger a decrease in serotonin levels?

Interestingly, a 2015 study, "Serotonin Synthesis and Reuptake in Social Anxiety Disorder,“ published in JAMA Psychiatry reported that Individuals with social phobia have too much serotonin—not too little.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that the more serotonin someone with SAD self-produced, the more anxious he or she became in social situations. This raises doubt about the common assumption that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs) help to lower social anxiety by keeping more serotonin in circulation.
In a statement, co-author Andreas Frick, a doctoral student at Uppsala University Department of Psychology said,



"Not only did individuals with social phobia make more serotonin than people without such a disorder, they also pump back more serotonin. We were able to show this in another group of patients using a different tracer which itself measures the pump mechanism.
We believe that this is an attempt to compensate for the excess serotonin active in transmitting signals. Serotonin can increase anxiety and not decrease it as was previously often assumed."

Taken together, all of this new research marks a significant leap forward when it comes to identifying changes in the brain's chemical messengers in people who suffer from social anxiety disorders. That said, much more research is needed to fully understand the enigmatic and complex workings of serotonin and transporter gene SLC6A4.

"There is still a great deal to be done in terms of researching the genetic causes of this illness," Andreas Forstner from the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Bonn concluded.

If you would like to get involved in the genetic research on social anxiety disorder, Forstner and colleagues are encouraging the general public to participate in their research online by visiting their website: Social Phobia Research. The more people that get involved in the study of social anxiety disorder, serotonin, and SLC6A4, the more precisely the researchers will be able to decode these complex mechanisms.
References: Psychology Today
Andreas J. Forstner, Stefanie Rambau, Nina Friedrich, Kerstin U. Ludwig, Anne C. Böhmer, Elisabeth Mangold, Anna Maaser, Timo Hess, Alexandra Kleiman, Antje Bittner, Markus M. Nöthen, Jessica Becker, Franziska Geiser, Johannes Schumacher, Rupert Conrad.

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Social Exclusion Leads to Conspiratorial Thinking

After analyzing the data, the researcher’s hypothesis was confirmed: Social exclusion does lead to superstitious beliefs and, according to their statistical analyses, is likely the result of one searching for meaning in everyday experiences. NeuroscienceNews.com image is for illustrative purposes only.

Researchers report people who experience social exclusion are more likely to believe disinformation, fake news and conspiracies.

Recent polls have shown that many white, working-class people in America feel pushed out by society, a reason why many voted for President Donald Trump. Many of these supporters latched onto misinformation spread online, especially stories that justified their own beliefs.

New research may show why so many were willing to believe exaggerated and misleading reports. According to a Princeton University study published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, social exclusion leads to conspiratorial thinking.

The two-part analysis — which did not specifically investigate Trump supporters, but two random samples of people — found that the feelings of despair brought on by social exclusion can cause people to seek meaning in miraculous stories, which may not necessarily be true.

Such conspiratorial thinking leads to a dangerous cycle, said co-lead author Alin Coman, assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton. When those with conspiratorial ideas share their beliefs, it can drive away family and friends, triggering even more exclusion. This may lead them to join conspiracy theory communities where they feel welcome, which in turn will further entrench their beliefs.



“Attempting to disrupt this cycle might be the best bet for someone interested in counteracting conspiracy theories at a societal level,” Coman said. “Otherwise, communities could become more prone to propagating inaccurate and conspiratorial beliefs.”

Coman published the study with Damaris Graeupner, a research assistant in Princeton’s Department of Psychology. For the first part of the study, they recruited 119 participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing internet marketplace.

Participants engaged in four phases. First, they were asked to write about a recent unpleasant event that involved a close friend. Next, they were asked to rate the degree to which they felt 14 different emotions, including exclusion, which was the emotion being analyzed.

They then were asked to complete a questionnaire that contained 10 statements and rank their agreement or disagreement using a seven-point scale from absolutely untrue to absolutely true. These statements included phrases like “I am seeking a purpose or mission for my life” and “I have discovered a satisfying life purpose.”

Finally, participants had to indicate the degree to which they endorsed three different conspiratorial beliefs ranging from one (not at all) to seven (extremely). These included the following statements: “Pharmaceutical companies withhold cures for financial reasons”; “Governments use messages below the level of awareness to influence people’s decisions”; and “Events in the Bermuda Triangle constitute evidence of paranormal activity.”

“We chose these particular conspiracy theories for their widespread appeal in the population,” Coman said. “These three are, indeed, endorsed by a significant portion of the American population.”

After analyzing the data, the researchers’ hypothesis was confirmed: Social exclusion does lead to superstitious beliefs and, according to their statistical analyses, is likely the result of one searching for meaning in everyday experiences.

“Those who are excluded may begin to wonder why they’re excluded in the first place, causing them to seek meaning in their lives. This may then lead them to endorse certain conspiracy beliefs,” Coman said. “When you’re included, it doesn’t necessarily trigger the same response.”



In the second part of the study, the researchers wanted to causally determine whether the degree to which someone was socially excluded influenced their conspiratorial beliefs. They recruited 120 participants, all of whom were Princeton University students

Participants were first asked to write two paragraphs describing themselves, one about “What it means to be me,” and another about “The kind of person I want to be.” They were told that these paragraphs would be given to two other participants in the room who would then rank whether they’d want to work with them.

Each of the three participants was then randomly selected to either be in the inclusion group (selected for collaboration in a subsequent task), the exclusion group (not selected for collaboration) or the control group (no instructions about selection). This was deceitful: The participants did not evaluate the other participants’ self-descriptions but instead descriptions created by the researchers. Finally, all participants went through the same four phases as the first study, which measured how social exclusion is linked to acceptance of conspiracy theories.

The second study replicated the findings of the first, providing solid experimental evidence that if a person feels excluded, they are more likely to hold conspiratorial beliefs.

In terms of policy, the findings highlight the need for inclusion, especially among populations at risk of exclusion.



“When developing laws, regulations, policies and programs, policymakers should worry about whether people feel excluded by their enactment,” Coman said. “Otherwise, we may create societies that are prone to spreading inaccurate and superstitious beliefs.
Source: Princeton University - NeuroscienceNews.com

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

The Time Reality: How its Rules Your Body—and Your Social Life

Time is inescapable, even if you try to ignore it, as author Alan Burdick did, by not wearing a watch.

We can’t smell it, we can’t taste it, we can’t hear it or touch it, but time is with us every second of our lives. And for thousands of years, philosophers and psychologists, from St. Augustine to William James, have pondered its meaning and how we perceive it. For his book Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation, Alan Burdick, who refused to wear a watch for much of his life, set off on a journey in search of time, which took him from a research station in the Arctic to the office of Coordinated Universal Time in Paris.

Speaking from his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, Burdick explains how having twins changed his ideas about time, why as far back as the Romans people have complained about being slaves to time, and how new discoveries in neuroscience show that our bodies are filled with clocks.

It’s ironic that, for many years, the author of a book about time refused to wear a watch. Why was that? And how did your perception of time change after you finally relented?

I started this book some time ago, when I was rather a different person. I really was of the mind that if I could take the time off of me physically, that I somehow made it go away. Part of it was that I am prone to think about mortality. Having a watch on me felt like being a grown up! It meant plugging into, and being subject to, all the things that time requires, like being on time, and it made me feel like my day was chopped up into little bits and my watch was going to parse them out to me, like pellets to a rat.



I used to think that this was a modern outlook but I came across a great quote from a Roman poet, complaining about the sundial and how awful it is that it chops our days up into hours.
A lot of other things changed, too. In my case, I had a family—two fraternal twin boys, ten years old—and that forced me to be on time and get more things done than I used to be able to. I had to come to peace with it in that regard. Also, the more I learned about my subject, the more I came to appreciate the extent to which time and timing is embedded in every aspect of our social lives. You and I are going to have a conversation on such-and-such date at such-and-such time and, in order to do that, the time on your watch in the U.K. has to exactly match my time in the U.S. That’s all made possible by this incredible process that goes into making universal coordinated time, which involves atomic clocks and this global coordinated.



One of the most original ideas in your book is that “time is contagious” and even leads us to feel empathy for one another. Unpack that idea for us.

Yes, it’s super weird! We can come at it from a bunch of different ways. One is that research has found that when people are in conversation in person, there are all these things we do without even noticing. If we’re having lunch, you and I will unconsciously pick up our forks more or less at the same time. There’s a great study about two people playing the game Whack-A-Mole. Even though they were competing against each other, their movements fell into synch, even at the expense of losing points. They would unconsciously work toward this synchrony. The more affiliated and friendly you are with that other person, the more you are in synch.



If I watch a video of two people talking, I will be able to tell, unconsciously, how friendly they are, based on the extent to which their movements fall into synch with each other. The difference between a fake and real smile is a matter of milliseconds. It’s incredibly important to know the difference, right? And, in order to tell the difference, you need, as a viewer, to have a really sensitive timing mechanism that can parse one from the other. We have these clocks in us, which are operating all the time. It’s a very open question where exactly in the brain they are and how they work. But it’s clear that they’re there and utterly essential to making our social interactions go smoothly.

The cool thing about hummingbirds is that their timing mechanism is super sophisticated. In one experiment, they flew around outdoors to different flowers, which recharge their nectar at different rates. The hummingbirds want to get to the flower when it has maximum nectar, before its competitor does. So it’s got to do this elaborate optimization and algorithm to figure out how to get there often enough to get what it wants, without getting there too soon and wasting time, or getting there too late and being beaten to it.

Scientists have known about circadian rhythms for a couple of hundred years in plants. But in the last 20 years, the genetic mechanism has become clear in humans. The idea is that each of our cells can essentially tell the time; they have a 24-hour clock, which enables the cell to organize all the things it needs to do, just like you and I. We need to meet at a certain time, or talk at a certain time. Within yourself, your organelles and proteins and genes have stuff to do. It has to happen in a certain order, and that requires a clock. In humans it’s a little over 24 hours long, pretty close to, but not exactly, the length of a day.



All your cells have this clock. Your stomach and liver, all your organs, have a clock. In order to keep those clocks in synch, mammals and we humans have a master clock in our brains that sends out a neuro-chemical signal on a regular basis. Like the conductor of an orchestra, it keeps all of these clocks in time so your body knows that when you eat, 30 minutes later, your liver’s going to jump into action, then your adrenal glands and kidneys are going to do their thing, and your fat cells are going to absorb energy on a certain schedule.

There’s been a lot of research showing that, for night shift workers, truck drivers and other people who work on schedules that don’t match the circadian rhythm, their metabolism is thrown off. Some cancers may even be associated with night shift work or circadian imbalances. Your body is expecting to metabolize food at certain times of the day but if you are living at a different time of day, you’re eating food when your fat cells want to be sleeping.

Michel Siffre is a French cave explorer. In the 1960s, at the height of the space race, scientists were thinking about whether humans could live for a long time in isolation in deep space. Siffre had this idea: What if I go live in this cave for a period of weeks, and monitor my own heart rate and sleep cycle? What does living in isolation away from the sun do to the body? It was clear that humans have circadian cycles and that our body temperatures go up and down on a reliable 24-hour cycle. But Siffre was the first to show that the circadian
cycle in humans is not exactly 24 hours long.

He went on to repeat a similar experiment in a cave in Texas. He was down there for about 6 months, all by himself. He could talk to people up on the surface every once in a while by message. But he had no idea what time it was. He all but went nuts from loneliness and sensory deprivation, because his sleep cycle went totally out of whack. There were times when he would sleep for 40 hours straight then be awake for a couple of days in a row, without knowing it. When he finally came out, he thought that he had been called out a month too soon because his count of the days was so far off.

Two very good but very separate questions! Time speeds up when we’re having fun for reasons that are going to sound circular and even tautological: i.e. when you’re having fun you aren’t looking at the clock or paying attention to the time. By contrast, when you’re bored and have nothing else to do, you’re thinking about the time.

Why does time seem to speed up as we get old? It’s one of the great paradoxes. The funny thing is, in surveys, whether they’re 20, 40, 60 or 80, 85 percent of people in every range say time is speeding up. All indications seem to be that it’s not so much that the time goes by faster, though. My sense of it is that, as you get older, you become more aware of how little time you have, so the time you have feels more precious.



The neatest experience I had was spending two weeks at a biological research station on the north slope of Alaska, just above the Arctic Circle. We were in constant daylight and I’d never experienced anything like that before. It was amazing and unnerving. Like everyone, I am accustomed to thinking of sleep as this demarcation between one day and the next. But when the sun is always up, I might sleep for 8 hours and it would seem like a nap. Two weeks was really one long day. It was deeply disorienting but that’s what I went there to experience.
I had hoped I would meet people who were studying circadian rhythms but none of them were. They were all studying different aspects of ecology and climate change on a much longer time scale than I had gone there to find. It did make me face the profound reality of the kind of long term change that we are now causing on the planet.

The thing that fascinated me most is the idea of time as a social glue, a language, which is
fundamental to all of our social interactions. We can’t interact and have social lives without it. What we do as a social species is share time. That’s almost the definition of being a social species. Once I understood that, it suddenly felt more important to wear a watch.

Even if I’m lying in bed at night with no clock or watch, I have clocks in every cell. All of those clocks together make a master clock. It’s not like I can get away from time. I might delude myself briefly into thinking so, but I can’t. We are filled with clocks.
By Simon Worrall

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.