Examining the association between variation of ASD and cognitive and affective domains of mentalizing in verbal children with ASD.

Abstract

Cognitive research in autism has often approached mentalizing abilities in global terms, and ultimately judged them to be impaired in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, recent studies have demonstrated that these social-cognitive abilities constitute neurocognitive constructs, encompassing both cognitive and affective domains, which are selectively found to be lacking in clinical categories. This study investigates the variation in autistic symptoms in relation to the graduation in gravity of cognitive and affective domains of mentalizing in children with ASD, aged 8 to 12 years. Mentalizing domains are assessed by the false-belief paradigms and by the Reading the Mind in the Eyes tasks in a group of 50 children with ASD. The findings showed that the severity of the children's autistic symptoms is inversely and strongly associated with their performance in first-(r = -0.762, p < .001) and second-order cognitive mentalizing (r = -0.674, p < .001), as well as affective mentalizing (r = -0.653, p < .001). However, the capacity for affective mentalizing was noticeably more impaired compared to those of cognitive mentalizing. The evidence confirms that the lower performance of children with ASD in mentalizing abilities is relatively dependent on the variation in their autistic symptoms and that the cognitive and affective domains of the latter are interrelated constructs.