Today, January 19th, our colleague Filipa Barros became the most recent doctorate in our group, having defended her doctoral thesis entitled "Relationships between autism characteristics, emotional-related variables, and olfactory processing in the general population".
Over these (approximately) 4 years, Filipa has investigated the impact of olfaction on autism spectrum disorders, exploring 1) anxiety and autism traits in the general population and 2) the relationship between autism characteristics, olfactory processing, anxiety and alexithymia. These points were explored throughout three studies, already published in international journals, which demonstrated the importance of considering the different dimensions of autism traits, in a multidimensional perspective, to better understand the complex relationship between autism, emotional variables and olfaction. Finally, in a fourth study, also published in an international journal, Filipa carried out a literature review on autism, olfaction and emotions, and established some lines of future studies in this area, with potential impact on the understanding of socio-emotional changes in the autism spectrum.
Below you can check some of outcomes of her PhD journey.
1. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0262960
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/.../pii/S0891422222001913
3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-020-04711-0
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32562688/
