• autism
• CDKL5
• emotional contagion
• empathy
• mice
• mice
• neurodevelopment
• pupillometry

Emotional contagion (ECo), one of the most simple forms of empathy, is an automatic emotional response to others emotions. While ECo has been thoroughly studied in wild-type rodents, its mechanisms and alterations in the context of neurodevelopmental and autistic-like disorders remain largely unexplored. This project aims to investigate ECo in CDKL5-deficient mice, a translational model of CDKL5 Deficiency Disorder (CDD) – a rare X-linked encephalopathy characterized by intellectual disability, motor impairment, seizures and autistic-like traits.
It has been recently shown that pupillary activity can address variations in the brain state not associated with noticeable changes in overt behavior, indicating that pupillometry has a high sensitivity to small and transient arousal fluctuations and it can detect both overt and covert behavioral phenomena. We propose to use pupillometry as a sensitive and non-invasive tool to measure emotional contagion during social interactions, instead of using traditional behavioral paradigms (like Vicarious freezing test). Thus, we demonstrated here the reliability of pupil dynamics in quantifying direct emotional response (DER), elicited by aversive stimulation, and vicarious emotional response (VER), elicited by witnessing the DER expressed by a conspecific.
On the basis of these data, we have then examined whether the emotional contagion process is altered in CDKL5 knockout (KO) mice. In particular, wild-type (WT) mice will serve as emotional demonstrators exposed to aversive stimuli, while CDKL5 KO mice will act as observers. Pupil dynamics of the observers will be recorded to assess the integrity of emotional reception.
These findings would challenge common assumptions about social impairments in neurodevelopmental disorders with autistic-like phenotype, contributing to a deeper understanding of emotional processing in neurodivergent brains and promoting a more inclusive perspective that resists stigmatization.