Measuring Individual Differences in Cognitive, Affective, and Spontaneous Theory of Mind Among School-Aged Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Melody Altschuler, Georgios Sideridis, Shashwat Kala and 5 others
PMID 29971661WHAT IT FOUND
In 60 school-aged children with autism, reasoning about minds split into cognitive and emotional factors, not a separate spontaneous factor.
Better reasoning about emotions was linked to milder social symptoms, not broader social functioning.
Key findings
01A two-factor model of cognitive and affective ToM fit the data, while adding a spontaneous ToM factor did not fit well.
02Affective ToM predicted social symptom severity, and better affective ToM was linked to less severe symptoms. No other tested relationship reached significance.
03Age and verbal IQ were unrelated to cognitive and affective ToM.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The sample was small and included only 60 children, with only 4 females. There was no comparison group without ASD or with another clinical condition. Some task data were missing: four children did not complete the first-order false-belief videos, and one child did not complete the TOM Test due to time constraints. Floor and ceiling effects may have limited the range of some ToM measures. The social symptom score came from laboratory-based ADOS-2 tasks, and the authors note it may not match parent-reported real-world social behavior. The study did not test any treatment, so it cannot show what improves symptoms or functioning.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the link between affective theory of mind and social symptom severity as proof that improving affective theory of mind will improve symptoms. The study measured children and did not test treatment.