Published in Social Neuroscience: an affective Stroop fMRI study of parents of autistic children

An fMRI study of social cognition and executive functions in parents of autistic children, using an affective Stroop task, was accepted in October 2026 and published in Social Neuroscience on 5 November 2026.

The case-control study compared 24 parents of autistic children with 25 controls. The parents showed lower emotional empathy and higher autistic-trait scores for attention to detail and imagination; on fMRI, they showed lower activation in the anterior cingulate, medial frontal and temporal regions during emotional interference.

It is based on Dr. Özge Tan Çamok’s psychiatry residency thesis, supervised by Assoc. Prof. Ali Kandeğer at Selçuk University. Its preliminary findings won first prize among research presentations at the 2024 PAT Annual Meeting.