Psychology Studies (3)

Psychology

Theory Of Mind

Theory Of Mind is: 

• being able to infer the full range of mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions, etc.) that cause action.

• In brief, having a theory of mind is to be able to reflect on the contents of one's own and other's minds." 

People with autism ussually have a deficit of Theory of Mind, this is because they have difficulty understanding other people's emotions and body language.

Simon Baron-Cohen dveloped the Thoery Of Mind during his study in 1997. 

Aim of the experiment:

• To provide more support for cognitive explantion of autism; That autistic adults lack theory of Mind

• They Theory Of Mind test, in which people have to choose the best word to describe the emotion displayed in a photograph of a persons eyes

Group 1

• 16 participants 
• 13 male and 3 female
• four with high functioning autism and aspergers syndrome
• mean IQ of 1.5.3

Group 2

• 50 participants 
• 25 male and 15 female
• drawn from general population of cambridge
• assumed to have IQ's in the normal range

Group 3

• Ten participants
• 8 male and 2 female 
• All with tourettes syndrome/ Mean IQ of 103.5

• Quasi Experiment 
• Eye Task- 25 standardised black and white photographs of eyes
• shown for three seconds
• forced choiced between 2 mental state terms 
• Asked "which word best describes what this person is thinking or fealing?"
• Strange stories task- used to check concurrent validity of the eyes task
• control tasks- gender recognition and basic emotion recognition

-Group 1 (autism) scored significantly lower on the eyes task than the other 2 groups

-No difference between group 2 (normal) and group 3 (tourettes) 

-Autism: 16.3

-control: 20.3

-Tourettes: 20.4 

-Group 1 more likely to make error on strange stories task than other groups

-No difference between the groups on gender recognition or basic emotion task 

-Females in 'normal' group preformed significantly better than the males on the eyest test. This means females generally have a better Theory of Mind. 

• The lack of theory of mind is a core deficit in autism spectrum disorders
• This explains the poor preformance in the Eye task could not be due to low IQ (as participants in group 1were at normal or above normal IQ)
• It could not be due to developmental neuro-psychiatric disibility, since the participants with tourettes syndrome had no difficulties with the task.