| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,770,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥870,000)
Fiscal Year 2012: ¥1,040,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥240,000)
Fiscal Year 2011: ¥2,730,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥630,000)
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| Research Abstract |
In this study project, an original psychological tests battery was developed to test human social intelligence such as social judgment, empathy, theory of mind, inequality aversion, facial recognition. Then, the battery was applied in clinical and non-clinical population. In addition to performance on the battery, brain activities were examined while the participants conducted the tasks. Furthermore, clinical trials were conducted to test the sensitivity of the battery and fMRI signal during the task for detecting the effect of intranasal oxytocin in the clinical population.The following findings were established and reported in the published papers. First, in the non-clinical population, we found that the social judgments of other’s hostility mainly based on nonverbal communication contents activated the posterior dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (post-dmPFC), bilateral anterior insula, and right dorsal posterior inferior frontal gyrus (pIFG), whereas the judgments biased by the verbal
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contents activated the bilateral ventral pIFG. In contrast, the anterior dmPFC (ant-dmPFC), bilateral superior temporal sulcus, and fusiform gyrus were commonly involved in both of the judgments. We further found that the post-dmPFC and right ventral pIFG were hub regions in networks underlying the nonverbal- and verbal-content-biased judgments, respectively. In addition, we revealed that these judgments -type-specific networks were bridged by the ant-dmPFC, which was recruited for the judgments earlier than the two hub regions (SCAN 2013). Then, we showed that the autism spectrum disorders (ASD) group made significantly less judgments primarily based on the nonverbal information than the typically-developed (TD) group, and they exhibited significantly less brain activity in the right IFG, bilateral anterior insula, ventral mPFC (vmPFC), and dmPFC than the TD group. Among these five regions, the vmPFC and dmPFC were most involved innonverbal-information-biased judgments in the TD group. Furthermore, the degree of decrease of the brain activity in these two brain regions predicted the severity of autistic communication deficits (PLoS ONE 2012). Finally, in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject crossover trial, we demonstrated behavioral and neural effects of single-dose intranasal oxytocin on socio-communicational deficits of ASD. As direct neurobiological evidence, oxytocin mitigates socio-communicational deficits through recovering originally-diminished brain activity in the medialprefrontal cortex (JAMA psychiatry, in press). Less
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