We’re still learning about how to best serve those with autism.
Catherine Talbot, assistant professor in the school of psychology at the Florida Institute of Technology, discusses how a hormone for social behavior could help.
Catherine F. Talbot is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at Florida Tech. After receiving her B.S. in Biology at Florida State University, Dr. Talbot completed her Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences at Georgia State University. Throughout her academic career, her overarching research goal has been to study the ultimate (evolutionary) and proximate (behavioral, biological, and developmental) mechanisms underlying sociality. Her graduate research focused on face recognition and social knowledge in nonhuman primates and was supported by the National Science Foundation, American Psychological Association, as well as a number of internal awards.
Dr. Talbot’s research interests include the evolutionary and biological mechanisms underlying sociality, face recognition and social processing, autism, behavioral economics, and animal welfare. She approaches these topics from a comparative, evolutionary, and translational perspective and has investigated such behavior in several primate species, including chimpanzees, orangutans, capuchin monkeys, squirrel monkeys, and rhesus macaques. Given the importance of faces in conveying social information and the impairment of social processing associated with many developmental and brain disorders, like autism spectrum disorder (ASD), face processing and its underlying mechanisms are one of the main foci of her research program. To this end, and in collaboration with her postdoctoral mentors, she helped develop and validate a naturally occurring monkey model of the core social deficits relevant to ASD, specifically targeting the underlying mechanisms of social functioning.
Currently, she and her collaborators are examining the relationship between potential biomarkers (e.g., oxytocin, vasopressin) of sociality and performance on a series of social-cognitive tests with direct relevance to ASD. By combining biomarker correlates (e.g., vasopressin, cortisol, etc.) and behavioral data we can significantly expand our understanding of how behaviors develop and are maintained.
Hormones and Social Behavior For Those With Autism Spectrum Disorder
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that one in 31 children in the U.S. is affected by autism spectrum disorder. That’s an increase from one in 36 children reported in 2020.
My research explores how vasopressin, a hormone that contributes to mammalian social behavior, could potentially serve as a new therapeutic option for people diagnosed with autism.
Like humans, rhesus monkeys’ individual variation in sociality is comparable to how human sociality varies, ranging from people we consider social butterflies to those who are not interested in social interactions, similar to some people with autism.
Our earlier work found that monkeys that are naturally low-social initiate fewer prosocial interactions and demonstrate weaknesses in social cognitive skills, like face recognition. In addition, low-social monkeys have lower vasopressin levels compared to more social monkeys, and, importantly, this finding was replicated in a small group of autistic people.
In our recent study, we used positive reinforcement to encourage these monkeys to approach and hold their face to a mask for several minutes while breathing either vasopressin or a placebo from a nebulizer. When these low-social monkeys received a dose of vasopressin, it restored their prosocial behavior to the levels we would expect to see from more social monkeys. We found that this effect was specific to the social domain, as their performance on nonsocial tasks did not change.
In other words, replenishing vasopressin, when the hormone is deficient, helps the monkeys become more social without increasing their aggression. By better understanding how natural variation in biology and behavior influences social cognition, it is our hope that this research will ultimately help people with autism better navigate their social worlds.
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