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. 2018 Nov;48(11):3945-3957.
doi: 10.1007/s10803-018-3663-1.

Measuring Individual Differences in Cognitive, Affective, and Spontaneous Theory of Mind Among School-Aged Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Melody Altschuler  1 , Georgios Sideridis  2   3 , Shashwat Kala  4 , Megan Warshawsky  5 , Rachel Gilbert  2 , Devon Carroll  2   6 , Rebecca Burger-Caplan  1 , Susan Faja  7   8   9   10
Affiliations

Measuring Individual Differences in Cognitive, Affective, and Spontaneous Theory of Mind Among School-Aged Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Melody Altschuler et al. J Autism Dev Disord. 2018 Nov.

Abstract

The present study examined individual differences in theory of mind (ToM) among a group of 60 children (7-11 years-old) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and average intelligence. Using open-ended and structured tasks to measure affective ToM, cognitive ToM, and spontaneous social attribution, we explored the nature of ToM and assessed whether ToM predicts the phenotypic heterogeneity in ASD through structural equation modeling. Affective ToM uniquely predicted social symptom severity, whereas no ToM types predicted parent reported social functioning. Our findings suggest that differentiating among theoretical components is crucial for future ToM research in ASD, and ToM challenges related to reasoning about others' emotions may be particularly useful in distinguishing children with worse social symptoms of ASD.

Keywords: Affective functioning; Autism spectrum disorder; Social cognition; Symptom severity; Theory of mind.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Two-factor correlated solution for the measurement of cognitive and affective ToM. Residual values (1-squared factor loadings) are not shown for parsimony.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Structural equation modeling (SEM) predicting the cognitive and affective aspects of ToM using the Vineland-2 and ADOS-2 instruments. A (*) indicates two-tailed significance at p<.05.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Simulated population distribution of path coefficient between ToM affective and the ADOS-2 using 10,000 replicated values using mean and variance estimates from the structural model. The value of zero was not included in the 95% confidence interval of the population distribution, suggesting that the path was significantly different from zero, agreeing with the inferential statistical finding (i.e., p<.05). The simulation was run using Mplus, 8.0.
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