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. 2023 Mar 9:14:974174.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.974174. eCollection 2023.

Assessing the construct validity of a theory of mind battery adapted to Tunisian school-aged children

Imène Soumaya Salhi  1 , Céline Lancelot  2 , Yousri Marzouki  3 , Wided Souissi  1 , Aya Nejiba Besbes  1 , Didier Le Gall  4 , Tarek Bellaj  3
Affiliations

Assessing the construct validity of a theory of mind battery adapted to Tunisian school-aged children

Imène Soumaya Salhi et al. Front Psychiatry. .

Abstract

Background: Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to understand others' states of mind, desires, emotions, beliefs, and intentions to predict the content of their mental representations. Two major dimensions within ToM have been studied. The first is the type of inferred mental state, which can be cognitive or affective. The second comprises the types of processes involved according to their degree of complexity (first- and second-order false belief and advanced ToM). ToM acquisition is fundamental-a key component in the development of everyday human social interactions. ToM deficits have been reported in various neurodevelopmental disorders through various tools assessing disparate facets of social cognition. Nevertheless, Tunisian practitioners and researchers lack a linguistically and culturally appropriate psychometric tool for ToM assessment among school-aged children.

Objective: To assess the construct validity of a translated and adapted French ToM Battery for Arabic-speaking Tunisian school-aged children.

Methods: The focal ToM Battery was designed with neuropsychological and neurodevelopmental theory and composed of 10 subtests distributed evenly in three parts: Pre-conceptual, cognitive, and affective ToM. Translated and adapted to the Tunisian sociocultural context, this ToM battery was individually administered to 179 neurotypical Tunisian children (90 girls and 89 boys) aged 7-12 years.

Results: After controlling for the age effect, construct validity was empirically confirmed on two dimensions (cognitive and affective) via structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis, demonstrating that this solution has a good fit. The results confirmed that the age affected differentially the performance obtained on ToM tasks based on the two components of the battery.

Conclusion: Our findings confirm that the Tunisian version of the ToM Battery has robust construct validity for the assessment of cognitive and affective ToM in Tunisian school-aged children; hence, it could be adopted in clinical and research settings.

Keywords: construct validity; psychological assessment; school-aged children; test adaptation; theory of mind.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Correlograms between the standardized ToM scores before (A) and after controlling for age (B). Heatmap values highlight negative correlations in red and positive in blue. Note that the size of the circles and the shading color of the correlation values are a function of the strength of correlations. The variables were ordered based on the angular order of the eigenvectors.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Structural equation modeling model with standardized structural coefficient estimates of the relationship between each latent variable and the corresponding exogenous variables.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Variation of the cognitive and affective total relative scores at the ToM battery according to age.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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