Abstract
A number of tasks have been developed to measure the affective theory of mind (ToM), nevertheless, recent studies found that different affective ToM tasks do not correlate with each other, suggesting that further studies on affective ToM and its measurement are needed. More in-depth knowledge of the tools that are available to assess affective ToM is needed to decide which should be used in research and in clinical practice, and how to interpret results. The current study focuses on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) primarily to investigate in a sample of 112 children the currently unexplored relationships in middle childhood between performance on the RMET and fluid intelligence. Relationships with receptive vocabulary, age, and sex were also investigated. Moreover, because studying the family's influence on children mentalization could have important implications in developing prevention and treatment interventions, this study offers a novel contribution to the field by exploring the family's influence on children's RMET performance. Although significant positive correlations were found among RMET-C performance, fluid intelligence, and receptive language, regression analysis revealed that fluid intelligence was the only predictor. No family influence was found on children's RMET performance. On the whole, results from the current study offer some support to the hypothesis that RMET-C is not a “pure” ToM task, specifically the effect of fluid intelligence on RMET performance should be taken into account when RMET is used both in research and in the clinical setting.
Highlights
IntroductionMentalization refers, in a broad sense, to the human ability to interpret one’s own and others’ behavior in terms of intentional mental states (e.g., desires, needs, feelings, and beliefs) (Allen, 2003; Fonagy and Target, 2005).Over the last decades several tasks have been designed to evaluate mentalization, and an extensive body of studies has focused on its development in non-clinical samples and its impairment in clinical groups
Mentalization refers, in a broad sense, to the human ability to interpret one’s own and others’ behavior in terms of intentional mental states (Allen, 2003; Fonagy and Target, 2005).Over the last decades several tasks have been designed to evaluate mentalization, and an extensive body of studies has focused on its development in non-clinical samples and its impairment in clinical groups
The current study aims primarily to investigate in a sample of school-aged children the currently unexplored relationship between performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET)—a widely used affective theory of mind (ToM) task—and fluid intelligence
Summary
Mentalization refers, in a broad sense, to the human ability to interpret one’s own and others’ behavior in terms of intentional mental states (e.g., desires, needs, feelings, and beliefs) (Allen, 2003; Fonagy and Target, 2005).Over the last decades several tasks have been designed to evaluate mentalization, and an extensive body of studies has focused on its development in non-clinical samples and its impairment in clinical groups. Warnell and Redcay (2019) administered a diverse set of ToM tasks to three different sample groups, each of which contained children of the same age, and found that at any age, receiving high scores on one task did not predict performance on another task designed to assess the same underlying ability. This study did not find any significant correlation between the scores obtained on the children’s version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RMETC; Baron-Cohen et al, 2001b), the Strange Stories (Happé, 1994), and the Faux Pas Task (Baron-Cohen et al, 1999). In middle childhood full-scale IQ was significantly related only to Strange Stories performance, suggesting that the association between ToM and intelligence should be investigated regarding each ToM component, rather than assumed regarding ToM as a unitary construct
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