Greater Pupil Size in Response to Emotional Faces as an Early Marker of Social‐Communicative Difficulties in Infants at High Risk for Autism

When scanning faces, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have shown reduced visual attention (e.g., less time on eyes) and atypical autonomic responses (e.g., heightened arousal). To understand how these differences might explain subclinical variability in social functioning, 9‐month‐olds, with or without a family history of ASD, viewed emotionally expressive faces, and gaze and pupil diameter (a measure of autonomic activation) were recorded using eye‐tracking. Infants at high risk for ASD with no subsequent clinical diagnosis (HRA‐) and low‐risk controls (LRC) showed similar face scanning and attention to eyes and mouth; attention was overall greater to eyes than mouth, but this varied as a function of the emotion presented. As a group, HRA‐ showed significantly larger pupil size than LRC. Correlations between scanning at 9 months, pupil size at 9 months, and 18‐month social‐communicative behavior, revealed positive associations between pupil size and attention to both face and eyes at 9 months in LRC, and a negative association between 9‐month pupil size and 18‐month social‐communicative behavior in HRA‐.The present findings point to heightened autonomic arousal in HRA‐. Further, with greater arousal relating to worse social‐communicative functioning at 18 months, this work points to a mechanism by which unaffected siblings might develop atypical social behavior.     

The Primal Scene in and about Psychoanalytic Institutions

ABSTRACT

Drawing on notions of primal scene and Bion’s theorizing of groups, this essay looks at the elements in institutional groups where transgressions and corruption may appear and develop and examines the difficulties group members have in working through the violations and potential disruptions to the institution’s functioning.     

Entrepreneurship by Any Other Name: Self-Sufficiency Versus Innovation

Entrepreneurship has been promoted as an innovative strategy to address the employment of people with disabilities. Research has predominantly focused on the self-sufficiency aspect without fully integrating entrepreneurship literature in the areas of theory, systems change, and demonstration projects. Subsequently there are gaps in services, policies, and research in this field that, in turn, have limited our understanding of the support needs and barriers or facilitators of entrepreneurs with disabilities. A thorough analysis of the literature in these areas led to the development of two core concepts that need to be addressed in integrating entrepreneurship into disability employment research and policy: clarity in operational definitions and better disability statistics and outcome measures. This article interrogates existing research and policy efforts in this regard to argue for a necessary shift in the field from focusing on entrepreneurship as self-sufficiency to understanding entrepreneurship as innovation.     

Repositioning Risk and Resilience: Improving the Lives of Children and Adults with Mental Health Problems in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

The repositioning of risk and resilience within the social work and mental health agenda is examined in this paper through a consideration of the social exclusion of vulnerable children and adults living in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA). There is a pressing need in this region for the development of better conceptions and cultural adaptations of risk and resilience models. An important task is spelling out the implications for effective prevention and intervention programs, and for practitioners and service users in terms of an inclusive, person-centred, and emancipatory practice. The societies of the EECA region may be understood as comprising a distinctive form of risk society, distinguished from Western counterparts by their adverse risk levels, and by their emancipatory potential. Strategies based on user inclusion and participatory action require to be fashioned, along with the development of the social work profession, to facilitate the empowerment of users in the EECA region.     

Performance Management and the Stifling of Academic Freedom and Knowledge Production

In an era of neoliberal reforms, academics in UK universities have become increasingly enmeshed in audit, particularly of research ‘outputs’. Using the data of performance management and training documents, this paper analyses the role of discourse in redefining the meaning of research, and in colonizing a new kind of entrepreneurial, corporate academic. The new regime in universities is characterized by slippage between the audit and disciplinary functions of performance management. We conclude that academic freedom is unlikely to emerge from a system which demands compliance with a regime of unattainable targets and constant surveillance.     

Strategic Experimentation

This paper extends the classic two-armed bandit problem to a many-agent setting in which N players each face the same experimentation problem. The main change from the single-agent problem is that an agent can now learn from the current experimentation of other agents. Information is therefore a public good, and a free-rider problem in experimentation naturally arises. More interestingly, the prospect of future experimentation by others encourages agents to increase current experimentation, in order to bring forward the time at which the extra information generated by such experimentation becomes available. The paper provides an analysis of the set of stationary Markov equilibria in terms of the free-rider effect and the encouragement effect.     

Hong Kong: From Worker to Manager

Review article on: Made by Hong Kong. Edited by Suzanne Berger and Richard K. Lester The Hong Kong Advantage. By Michael T. enright, Edit E. Scott and David Dodwell