Mind Reading Research Articles

Remediation of Deficits in Recognition of Facial Emotions in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

This study evaluated the efficacy of the Mind Reading interactive computer software to remediate emotion recognition deficits in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Six unmedicated children with ASD and 11 unmedicated non-clinical control subjects participated in the study. The clinical sample used the software for five sessions. The control sample was evaluated only on pre- and post-test performance to assess practice effects. Results showed that participants with ASD scored significantly higher on the posttest than on the pretest. As level of emotion difficulty increased, mean scores on the pretest decreased, indicating that difficulty level had a valid effect. The Mind Reading computer software appears to significantly improve the emotion recognition abilities in children with ASD.

Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind: When children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others

The objective of this paper is to discuss whether children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing. The results of two experiments point to the existence of such non-mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others. In Study 1, young children (3- and 4-year-olds) were told different versions of classic false-belief tasks, some of which were modified by the introduction of a rule or a regularity. When the task (a standard change of location task) included a rule, the performance of 3-year-olds, who fail traditional false-belief tasks, significantly improved. In Study 2, 3-year-olds proved to be able to infer a rule from a social situation and to use it in order to predict the behaviour of a character involved in a modified version of the false-belief task. These studies suggest that rules play a central role in the social cognition of young children and that deontic reasoning might not necessarily involve mind reading.

Metacognition and Severe Adult Mental Disorders: From Research to Treatment

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessMetacognition and Severe Adult Mental Disorders: From Research to TreatmentBhargavi Devineni, M.D., and David Garfield, M.D.Bhargavi DevineniSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., and David GarfieldSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Feb 2011https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.62.2.pss6202_0228AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Metacognition and Severe Adult Mental Disorders: From Research to TreatmentDimaggioGiancarloLysakerPaul H.; New York, Routledge, 2010, 344 pages, $49.95As human beings we have a unique capacity of making meaning of information we take in and forming representations of our mental states. In doing so, we label our emotions and think about the desires and intentions of ourselves and others. The process of thinking about thinking, defined in simple terms, is known as metacognition. It is a uniquely human capacity, one that is necessary for a successful adaptation in our dynamic social world. As awareness of the process of metacognition has grown, so have considerations of its deficits in relationship to various forms of psychopathology, such as autism. In the 1990s, the possibility of deficits in the metacognitive capacity of adults with serious mental disorders was examined, which led to an explosion in metacognition literature. These efforts involved a variety of research methods and foci.The editors of Metacognition and Severe Adult Mental Disorders present an overview of these research findings, emerging theoretical issues, and implications for clinical practice. Both Dr. Dimaggio and Dr. Lysaker have extensive research and clinical expertise in personality disorders and in the development of metacognitive capacity through individual psychotherapy for persons with schizophrenia, respectively. They have assembled a group of international contributors to provide chapters that look at the role of metacognitive deficits in schizophrenia, depression, alexithymia, personality disorders, and trauma-related disorders and that present ideas for psychotherapeutic treatment and future research in this field.The book starts with a detailed introduction arguing that the concept of metacognition is central to the psychopathology of many severe mental disorders and concludes by summarizing the suggestions of the chapter authors and pointing to future research questions.The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 covers how metacognitive deficits may arise, their social and neurocognitive bases, and developmental origins of metacognitve disorders among adults. Part 2 examines the psychopathology of metacognition in various adult mental disorders, and part 3 explores whether specific deficits in metacognition might help us understand differing forms of severe mental illness and discusses clinical implications in general and as applied to various mental disorders and psychotherapies.Although this book is written on a premise of metacognition as an umbrella concept, chapter authors use their preferred terminology, which includes different concepts that help to make sense of mental states in a variety of ways: theory of mind, mentalizing, social cognition, social understanding, and mind reading or psychological mindedness are all spokes of the metacognition wheel. Metacognition as conceptualized in this book operates across a number of semi-independent domains. These domains differ according to the subject that is the focus of each particular metacognitive act. Hence the collection of different concepts by contributors with diverse expertise aids in understanding metacognition as a central concept and metacognitive deficits as resulting in specific mental disorders.The varying perspectives presented in this book provide material for researchers and academicians more so than for clinicians to derive testable hypotheses and to stimulate future research in this field, which is clearly needed in order to improve our understanding of psychopathology and to enhance treatment strategies.The reviewers report no competing interests.Dr. Devineni is clinical assistant professor and Dr. Garfield is professor, associate chair, and program director in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Chicago Medical School, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, North Chicago, Illinois.Dr. Devineni is also staff psychiatrist at North Chicago Veterans Medical Center. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 62Issue 2 February 2011Pages 228-228 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 February 2011 Published in print 1 February 2011

The Motion Picture Mind-Reading Test

The Motion Picture Mind Reading (MPMR) Test is a novel naturalistic mind-reading task, designed to measure individual differences in a young adult population in Japan. Short scenes from TV films showing characters in social situations were presented to 128 university students; participants judged the mental state of a character in these films. The distribution of task performance (MPMR Test) of participants was approximately normal and its psychometric properties were found to be satisfactory. The MPMR Test scores correlated positively with those of the Eyes Test and also with scores on the empathy quotient (EQ); they correlated negatively with scores on the systemizing quotient (SQ). The MPMR Test provides a further method for assessing subtle individual differences in mind-reading ability in the general population.

What to Expect When You Pick up a Graphic Novel

What to Expect When You Pick up a Graphic Novel Lisa Zunshine (bio) We live in other people's heads: avidly, reluctantly, consciously, unawares, gropingly, inescapably. A stranger sitting across the table at the library turns away from her laptop screen, extends her forearm, and begins to move her eyes from the tip of her index finger to her nose and back. It's a kind of eye calisthenics; she obviously wants to keep her nearsightedness under control. I sigh and look away: I really should do the same exercises, but I am too lazy. When I look at her again, I see that she sees me looking at her, so I let my glance slide past her casually: I don't want her to think that I am staring. Our daily lives are unimaginable without such constant nonverbal interactions. We explain other people's observable behavior in terms of unobservable mental states and assume that they explain our behavior the same way. Mental states: thoughts, desires, feelings, intentions. She does that exercise because she wants to improve her eyesight. I sigh because I feel bad about my laziness. I don't know what she thinks when she notices my look, but I think up a little narrative about what she might think and what I should do so that she doesn't think this. Note that to describe this for you now I construct a neat sequence of sentences, making it seem like an evenly paced, conscious, and fully verbalized process, but when it was actually happening it was fast, messy, intuitive, not particularly conscious, and certainly not verbalized. We've been doing this daily for hundreds of thousands of years. (Nightly too: we attribute intentions to creatures populating our dreams.) Psychologists have a special term for the evolved cognitive adaptation that makes us see behavior as caused by underlying mental states. They call it theory of mind, also known as folk psychology and mind-reading. The latter term is particularly inapt. Given how many of our attributions and interpretations of thoughts and feelings are wrong or only approximately correct, they might as well call it mind-misreading. But since evolution doesn't deal in perfection, we have to fumble through by "reading minds" as well as we can. Because when we can't do it—that is, when the cognitive architecture that makes an automatic attribution of mental states possible [End Page 114] is impaired, as it appears to be with autism spectrum condition—we are faced with social challenges of a different order of magnitude.1 In the last five years, theory of mind has become a major research topic among cognitive, developmental, comparative and social psychologists, as well as cognitive neuroscientists.2 Though everything they learn opens up more questions and will remain the subject of debates for years to come, theory of mind is increasingly thought of as a crucial cognitive endowment of our species—a cornerstone of imagination, pretense, morality, and language, indeed of every aspect of human sociality. The emphasis on the social aspect of mind-reading is central to the argument of this essay. I suggest that graphic narratives build on theory-of-mind adaptations to offer their readers a pleasurable exercise in navigating complex social situations. I also suggest that these narratives use a variety of visual cues to signal to their readers what levels of mind-reading complexity—I call it sociocognitive complexity—they may expect when they pick up a particular graphic novel or memoir. The overarching claim of my essay is that all narrative-oriented cultural representations, such as fiction, movies, plays, team sports broadcasts, as well as some forms of art, singing, and dance, reflect the workings of our theory of mind. This means that we can understand better how specific representations, such as graphic narratives, affect us if we ask how they engage our theory of mind. I lay out this larger claim in the first part, in which I invite you to imagine what our culture would be like if our theory-of-mind adaptations were magically turned off. The second part elaborates the concept of sociocognitive complexity with a particular emphasis on the pleasure...

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks Robin Dunbar Harvard University Press, 2010 University of Oxford Professor Robin Dunbar has written a series of essays exploring the evolutionary origins of a multitude of seemingly unrelated modern behaviors. He manages, though to smoothly transition between essays, chapter to chapter, and at the end of the book comes full circle back to his opening theme. There are those who have suggested that what distinguishes humans from other animals is the ability to use language, formulate moral codes or tool making. However, Dunbar suggests that the crucial differentiation between the primates, including humans, and other animals is the primates' highly involved social relationships, the source of cooperative social groups which facilitate individual survival and reproductive fitness. Culture, defined behavioral norms, and products of intellectual effort, such as literature and sciences, is seen as an extension of human biology and not a separate entity as currently claimed by social scientists. Human social interactions, then, leads to the formation of the things that we assume to be "uniquely" human. The source human culture is the brain, the neocortex in particular. The neocortex is not only the center of higher motor and sensory function but also of memory and reasoning. Dunbar demonstrates a positive correlation between primate neocortical size and group size. Since the human brain does not have an infinite capacity for memory and reasoning, there is an upper limit to the number of people with whom humans are able to have meaningful, face-to-face interactions and the limit is 150, i.e., "Dunbar's Number." In addition to social interaction, increasing neocortical size over the course of human evolution allowed for the development of other cognitive adaptations such as "mind reading," or the perception of others' intentions ("I believe that you think that..."). Increasing degrees of "intentionality" moved a personal belief to a shared community belief ("I want you to know that we both believe that God wants us to..." ). That humans are capable of stepping away from the world as it is and ponder on what could be has implications for the origin of religion and its role in binding community members. Humans somehow know when critical mass is attained - how human groups know when to break off at 150 is not explained - but Dunbar's Number repeatedly appears as an upper limit to group size, in hunter-gatherer, preagricultural tribes, in medieval-era English villages and into contemporary social networks. Despite the dominance of mass urban culture, intimate groupings the size of Dunbar's Number appear in various ways. Dunbar and his colleagues found that every Christmas, individuals send Christmas cards to an average of 68 households. Adding up the individuals in each household works out to a total of around 150. Businesses with less than 150 employees tend to have informal management structures and employees exhibit mutual cooperation and trust, whereas larger companies suffer from a "disproportionate amount of absenteeism and sickness". Here Dunbar only briefly alludes to the psychological effects seen in large groups which lack close interpersonal relationships, the effects of which are so striking that they cannot be easily overlooked. Particularly in the West, one can readily note a general lack of altruism and trust but an abundance of aggressive competition (Miller, 2009; Alkon, 2010). Perhaps extreme social disconnection underlies the infrequent but lethal shooting sprees in the US, wherein individualism is, perhaps excessively, valued. Similarly lethal violence is beginning to appear in other western countries - perhaps a similar, severe sense of alienation also motives these perpetrators.1 Rather than "mutual obligation and reciprocity," modern social interactions are structured by contracts and laws backed by coercion. …

Investigating reliability of Reading Mind in the Eyes Test in a Turkish population

Investigating reliability of Reading Mind in the Eyes Test in a Turkish population

Systematic cognitive biases in courtship context: women's commitment–skepticism as a life-history strategy?

According to error management theory (EMT) [Haselton M.G., & Buss D.M. (2000). Error management theory: a new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 81–91], evolved psychological mechanisms can lead to systematic cognitive errors whenever costs of false-positive and false-negative decisions have been asymmetrical over evolutionary history. In a courtship context, sex differences in reading commitment intent in a potential partner seem to be a result of these psychological mechanisms. EMT predicts a bias in women toward underperception of men's commitment intentions. Haselton and Buss found evidence for a commitment–skepticism bias in studies testing young women. These findings have not been replicated yet in the published literature. The present two studies compared postmenopausal women with fertile women in a German sample, extending EMT with a life-history perspective. According to the original commitment–skepticism hypothesis, women err on the side of underestimating prospective mates' commitment to avoid the high costs of pregnancy without support. We hypothesize that for postmenopausal women the costs of errors would be more equal or possibly reversed, such that these women face greater costs of missed opportunities with investing partners who could assist them in caring for extant offspring and grand offspring than from falsely assuming that a partner was committed. Therefore, we hypothesize that commitment–skepticism will not occur in postmenopausal women. Confirming our predictions, whereas we replicated the commitment–skepticism in the younger sample, postmenopausal women did not show a bias toward underinferring men's commitment intentions.

Reading Minds: The Relation Between Children’s Mental State Knowledge and Their Metaknowledge About Reading

The relation between children's mental state knowledge and metaknowledge about reading was examined in 2 studies. In Study 1, 196 children (mean age = 9 years) were tested for verbal ability (VA), metaknowledge about reading, and mental state words in a story task. In Study 2, the results of Study 1 were extended by using a cross-lagged design and by investigating older children (N = 71, mean ages = 10 years at Time 1 and 11 years at Time 2) for mental state knowledge, metaknowledge about reading, and VA. Results showed a significant relation between early cognitive (but not emotion) mental state knowledge and later metaknowledge about reading, controlling for VA. Results suggest close links between different aspects of children's knowledge about the mind.

Is “reading mind in the eyes” impaired in Parkinson’s disease?

Theory of mind (ToM) is the specific cognitive ability to understand other people’s mental states. Several studies have examined ToM ability in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), using the “reading mind in the eyes” test (RMET). However, there has been no agreement as to whether or not ToM ability in this task is affected by PD. In order to obtain conclusive evidence regarding ToM ability in PD, we examined RMET-related performance in nondemented PD patients; we also used the semantic discrimination task to exclude the possibility that PD patients had difficulty in distinguishing emotional adjectives. Results indicated that ToM ability in the RMET is impaired in PD patients, and that this finding was not attributable to the visual processing of faces or the verbal comprehension of emotional adjectives. Thus, the affective aspects of ToM can be impaired in PD patients.

Reading Minds in Greek Tragedy

A notable intellectual development of the past decade or two has been the ever-growing interest in human consciousness and the workings of the mind. Sometimes grouped under the umbrella term ‘cognitive sciences’, diverse disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and linguistics have all made major contributions to our understanding of the human mind and brain; and the large number of popular science books published in this area show that this can be an engrossing topic for the layperson as much as for experts. In this article we want to explore, at a rather general and non-technical level, how this focus on matters of cognition can help us think about an aspect of Greek tragedy.

Reading mind from eye gaze in a patient with bilateral superior temporal sulcus lesion

Reading mind from eye gaze in a patient with bilateral superior temporal sulcus lesion

Life and Death in Naples

Life and Death in Naples Leslie Richardson (bio) The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller. (University of Chicago Press, 2008. Illustrated. 128 pages. $13) Among the glorious cities of Italy, Naples may be the least attractive to modern tourists—and for good reason. On a packaged itinerary Naples means a mediocre meal near the port where empty streets, blowing litter, and a view of the lumpish Castel Nuovo in the foreground dampen one’s spirits. Good humor will be restored the next day at Pompeii or Capri or Sorrento when travelers depart for those loveable Italian towns where pleasure is predictable and pickpockets, homicidal traffic, and garbage collection are somewhat under control. There is nothing new about the discomfort and danger that Naples has in store for outsiders—everyone not born there being thus defined. The Decameron has a tale of a callow youth who comes down from Perugia to the Angevin capital and falls into a waking nightmare simply because he had fingered his purseful of golden florins in full view of the marketplace. Nowadays the fannypack has made this impulsive gesture next to impossible, but anxiety is kept at the simmer by locals who constantly warn one to conceal everything snatchable and to return to the hotel before nightfall. Of course, nothing deters a traveler prepared to risk any adversity in hopes of revelation or adventure. Shirley Hazzard, the Australian novelist who has loved the city for sixty years, is one of a long line of distinguished visitors like Boccaccio, Dickens, Goethe, and Byron who have come down to Naples from the north and found the destination worth the trouble. The Ancient Shore, Shirley Hazzard’s new book of selected essays buttressed with a piece by her husband, Francis Steegmuller, is a love letter to Naples. Like someone who introduces a glamorous but unacceptable, even dangerous, lover to the folks at home, Hazzard acknowledges that on a certain level Naples is logically indefensible. Its sinister quality is at least a part of the attraction. In her novel The Bay of Noon she describes a young English-woman, like herself, who is struck by the odd beauty of her apartment overlooking the bay and Vesuvius. She calls the place uncanny, eccentric, “with something of the sinister that is the authentic element of romance.” Shirley Hazzard grew up in Sydney, but soon after the war her father moved the family to Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and England. Shirley Hazzard left London for Naples in 1956 to take a job with nato. Like Boccaccio, who was sent there by his father to learn about banking, Hazzard found her assignment profoundly uncongenial. She was a translator of military documents and would later write a novel (People in Glass Houses) satirizing the nato bureaucracy based on that experience. She was in her twenties when she first saw Naples; Boccaccio was barely fifteen. Both were blessed with the luxury of solitude in a strange and complex city. Both were surely [End Page ci] endowed with what Hazzard calls “the reading mind and the aroused imagination,” qualities which guaranteed that official assignments would be intolerable; but Naples itself would forever haunt their minds and inform their art. Boccaccio managed to linger in the city for fifteen years until his father forced him to return to Florence. He revisited it twice in later life but was unable to recapture the joy of his youth. Shirley Hazzard stayed with the nato job for only a year, but she still spends some of her time in Capri, well within the orbit of Vesuvius. The Ancient Shore is a selection of her dispatches on selected topics (the G7 Conference, Vesuvius, the headland of Posillipo) previously published in the New Yorker and elsewhere. They are meditations on the paradox of Naples, its extraordinary beauty rendered uneasy by deceptiveness, its rewards inseparable from its frustrations. She says it is only natural that a city made up of neighborhoods will elude the tourist who typically looks for a centro storico for his bearings. If there is one center to the city, she says, it would be the Spaccanapoli district, the “split of Naples,” but it is...

Validation of Brief Screening Tools for Mental Disorders Among New Zealand Prisoners

Validation of Brief Screening Tools for Mental Disorders Among New Zealand Prisoners

Reading minds: Mentalization, irony and literary engagement

The concept of ‘mentalization’ has recently provided a fertile resource for thinking about various issues in psychoanalysis, including attachment, children’s play, personality disorders and the work of interpretation within the analytic setting. Mentalization also provides fruitful ways of thinking about how we read. This paper will suggest that book reading is akin to mind reading: engaging with certain literary texts is akin to understanding the minds of others from the subjective perspective required by mentalization. This way of thinking about literature provides a useful way of understanding its value. The paper will focus specifically on the uses of irony and free indirect speech in Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion. Austen’s use of literary techniques provides a way of understanding the inner lives of her characters via the ironic voice of the implied author, and requires the reader to engage in the kinds of understanding and insight required for mentalization.

The Mechanics of Mind Reading

Recent advances in brain scanning allow unprecedented access to our thoughts and mental states

Classification of Complex Information: Inference of Co-Occurring Affective States from Their Expressions in Speech

We present a classification algorithm for inferring affective states (emotions, mental states, attitudes, and the like) from their nonverbal expressions in speech. It is based on the observations that affective states can occur simultaneously and different sets of vocal features, such as intonation and speech rate, distinguish between nonverbal expressions of different affective states. The input to the inference system was a large set of vocal features and metrics that were extracted from each utterance. The classification algorithm conducted independent pairwise comparisons between nine affective-state groups. The classifier used various subsets of metrics of the vocal features and various classification algorithms for different pairs of affective-state groups. Average classification accuracy of the 36 pairwise machines was 75 percent, using 10-fold cross validation. The comparison results were consolidated into a single ranked list of the nine affective-state groups. This list was the output of the system and represented the inferred combination of co-occurring affective states for the analyzed utterance. The inference accuracy of the combined machine was 83 percent. The system automatically characterized over 500 affective state concepts from the Mind Reading database. The inference of co-occurring affective states was validated by comparing the inferred combinations to the lexical definitions of the labels of the analyzed sentences. The distinguishing capabilities of the system were comparable to human performance.

A single case design evaluation of a software and tutor intervention addressing emotion recognition and social interaction in four boys with ASD

Many students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have delays learning to recognize emotions. Social behavior is also challenging, including initiating interactions, responding to others, developing peer relationships, and so forth. In this single case design study we investigated the relationship between use of computer software (Mind Reading: The Interactive Guide to Emotions) and emotion recognition (ER) and social behavior change. After using Mind Reading for 7 to 10 weeks with a tutor, four boys with ASD improved ER scores and social interactions with peers. However, observed behavior changes were not strong enough to claim a causal relationship between variables. Findings, practice implications, and future research are discussed.

There is more to mind reading than having theory of mind concepts: new directions in theory of mind research

AbstractFor more than 30 years, researchers have focused on the important transition that children undergo between the ages of 3 and 5, when they start to solve mind‐reading problems that require reasoning about complex mental states, such as beliefs. The main question for debate has been whether, during that transition, children acquire new concepts about how the mind works (i.e. a more sophisticated ‘theory of mind’) or whether their more general cognitive abilities improve and help them deal with the general task demands. Recently, researchers have started to explore mind‐reading abilities in individuals outside of the classic 3–5 age span, showing early theory of mind abilities in ever‐younger children and infants, but also far from flawless performance in adults. In this article, we show how the results of these two new lines of research converge on the idea that there is more to mind reading than having theory of mind concepts: there are various processes required to efficiently implement theory of mind concepts in our reasoning, and there may be, in fact, multiple mind‐reading routes available. We then highlight the emergent new directions for future research. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Empathy: From Mind Reading to the Reading of a Distant Text

In the psychoanalytic literature empathy is commonly discussed as a form of "mind reading", which is deeply associated with the capacity to mirror the other's mental state. In this paper, I propose an alternative perspective on empathy as the process of reading a distant text. This perspective is illustrated through a Talmudic story and by weaving a thread between Bakhtin, Bion and Lacan. The paper concludes by pointing to the danger of empathy as a hidden form of projective identification that provides the reader with a false sense of control rather than with negative capability for otherness.