Cerebral Blood Flow Changes Associated with Fear Emotion in Children with Autism

Fear emotion video was presented as emotional stimulus to children with autism and healthy children as control to explore the relationship between impairment of emotion processing in autism and disruption of prefrontal area in a functional near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) study. Compared with healthy control group, the response of oxy-hemoglobin (oxy-Hb) in prefrontal cortex, especially in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, was lower for children with autism. It was indicated that emotional cognition of autism is inferior to healthy children; the level of activation of prefrontal is different between two groups. This result suggested the mode of emotional processing in autism is novel compared to healthy children. There was no significant difference in emotion intensity for two groups.