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Jonathan Delafield-Butt is Professor of Child Development and Director of the Laboratory for Innovation in Autism at Strathclyde. His work examines the origins of conscious experience and the embodied and emotional foundations of psychological development, with attention to the subtle but significant motor disruption evident in autism spectrum disorder. He took his Ph.D. in Developmental Neurobiology at the University of Edinburgh Medical School before extending to Developmental Psychology with application of intersubjectivity theory in postdoctoral work at the Universities of Edinburgh and Copenhagen. He held scholarships at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh for science-philosophy bridgework. Delafield-Butt trained pre-clinically in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Scottish Institute for Human Relations. He is a member of the World Association for Infant Mental Health and the International Society for Autism Research. His team currently develops bespoke wearable and smart device serious games to characterise the motor disruption in autism spectrum disorder, and its social and psychological consequences. He collaborates with the University of Pisa on brainstem imaging of young children with autism, a likely contributor to the motor disruption in ASD, and with colleagues at Glasgow and Edinburgh on a new, SINAPSE-supported 7T brainstem imaging project.
Research Themes:
development, emotions, movement, embodied intersubjectivity, and autism.
Key Publications:
Bosco, P., Giuliano, A., Delafield-Butt, J., Muratori, F., Calderoni, S., & Retico, A. (2019). Brainstem enlargement in pre-school children with autism: Results from an inter-method agreement study of segmentation algorithms. Human Brain Mapping. 1-13. doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24351
Millar, L., McConnachie, A., Minnis, H., Wilson, P., Thompson, L., Anzulewicz, A., . . . Delafield-Butt, J. (2019). Phase 3 diagnostic evaluation of a smart tablet serious game to identify autism in 760 children 3–5 years old in Sweden and the United Kingdom. BMJ Open, 9(7), e026226. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2018-026226
Delafield-Butt, J., Trevarthen, C., Rowe, P., & Gillberg, C. (2019). Commentary. Being misunderstood in autism: The role of motor disruption in expressive communication, implications for satisfying social relations. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 42, e86.
Trevarthen, C., & Delafield-Butt, J. (2019). The Early Embodied Development of ASD, and Its Care. In U. N. Das, N. Papaneophytou, & T. El-Kour (Eds.), Autism Spectrum Disorder. The Netherlands: Elsevier.
Malloch, S., Delafield-Butt, J., & Trevarthen, C. (2019). Embodied Intersubjectivity and the Vitality of Cultural Meaning: Narratives of Communicative Musicality in Learning, and in Teaching. In M. A. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Teacher Education: Springer.
Delafield-Butt, J. T., Freer, Y., Perkins, J., Skullina, D., Schögler, B., & Lee, D. N. (2018). Prospective control of neonatal arm movements: A motor foundation of embodied agency, disrupted in premature birth. Developmental Science. e12693.
Delafield-Butt, J.T. (2018). The emotional and embodied nature of human understanding: Sharing narratives of meaning. in Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt and Dunlop (eds.) The Child’s Curriculum: Working with the natural values of children. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McKeever, L., Cleland, J. & Delafield-Butt, J. (2018). Aetiology of Speech Sound Errors in Autism. in Fuchs, S., Cleland, J. & Rochet-Cappelan, A. (eds.). Speech Production and Perception: Learning and Memory. Berlin: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers
Trevarthen, C., & Delafield-Butt, J. T. (2017). Development of consciousness. In B. Hopkins, E. Geangu, & S. Linkenauger (Eds.), Cambridge encyclopedia of child development (pp. 821-835). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Delafield-Butt, J., & Trevarthen, C. (2017). On the brainstem origin of autism: Disruption to movements of the primary self. In E. Torres & C. Whyatt (Eds.), Autism: The movement sensing perspective: Taylor & Francis CRC Press.
Anzulewicz, A., Sobota, K., & Delafield-Butt, J. T. (2016). Toward the autism motor signature: Gesture patterns during smart tablet gameplay identify children with autism. Scientific Reports, 6. doi:10.1038/srep31107
Delafield-Butt, J. T., & Trevarthen, C. (2015). The ontogenesis of narrative: From moving to meaning. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01157
Trevarthen, C., & Delafield-Butt, J. T. (2013). Autism as a developmental disorder in intentional movement and affective engagement. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 7, 49. doi:10.3389/fnint.2013.00049
Trevarthen, C., & Delafield-Butt, J. T. (2013). Biology of shared meaning and language development: Regulating the life of narratives. In M. Legerstee, D. Haley, & M. Bornstein (Eds.), The infant mind: Origins of the social brain (pp. 167-199). New York: Guildford Press.
Delafield-Butt, J. T., & Gangopadhyay, N. (2013). Sensorimotor intentionality: The origins of intentionality in prospective agent action. Developmental Review, 33(4), 399-425. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2013.09.001
Collaborators:
Prof. Colwyn Trevarthen (Psychology, University of Edinburgh) on child development, embodied intersubjectivity and psychopathology.
Prof. Phil Rowe (Biomedical Engineering, University of Strathclyde) on characterisation of autism motor disruptions.
Dr. Cyril Pernet (Clinical Brain Science, University of Edinburgh) on 7T brainstem neuroimaging.
Prof. Filippo Muratori & Dr Sara Calderoni (Child Psychiatry, Univeristy of Pisa) on brainstem origin of autism motor disruptions.
Dr Alessandra Retico and Dr Paolo Bosco (Pisa Division, Italian Nuclear Physics Institute) on brainstem neuroimaging of children (1.5T) and on 7T brainstem nuclei metrics in autism.
Prof. Koichi Negayama (Human Sciences, Waseda University, Tokyo) on cultural differences in embodied mother-infant interaction.
Prof. Ivan Andonovic (Electronics and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde) on wearable development and machine learning for ecological, early assessment of autism.
Prof. Domenico Campolo (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) on bespoke engineering for movement analysis.
Dr Anna Anzulewicz and Krzysiek Sobota (Warsaw, Poland) on smart device development and serious game early detection of autism using machine learning methods.
Prof. Nicole Rinehart (Deakin University) and Prof. Jennifer McGinley (Melbourne University) on autism motor disruption in children with autism.