ASD; individual differences, theory of mind evaluation?

Question 1

Evaluation; Research support?

Answer 1

• Baron Cohen et al (2001) used the Eye Task, to assess ToM deficits. Their participants were 15 adults with ASD and a control group of 239 without ASD. Participants with ASD performed significantly worse on this task than the controls, a finding that indicates an impaired ability to understand another person’s internal mental state?
• Ofer Golan et al (2007) carried out a similar test, but using brief spoken phrases (reading the mind in the voice test). Their adult participants with ASD were impaired in recognising emotional cues in vocal expression.
• Both studies support the validity of ToM deficit as a feature of ASD, especially as both tests are less dependent on language comprehension abilities than for example, a false belief test.

Question 2

Evaluation; An incomplete explanation?

Answer 2

• Helen Tager-Flusberg (2007) accepts that the ToM explanation can explain social and communication impairments in ASD. however, she points out that it is much less successful in accounting for the non social features of the disorder.
• This is particularly true of the repetitive behaviours and obsessive interests that form part of the diagnosis under both DSM-V and ICD-10.
• Neither can the explanation account for the cognitive strengths of some people with ASD, for example their greater attention skills.
• Uta Frith and Francesca Happe (1994) highlight the 20% of children who actually passed the original false belief test of Baron-Cohen et al(1985).
• Some adults even passed the more sensitive and less language dependent eyes and voice tests described above.
• ToM deficits cannot explain these findings, so the explanation lacks validity because it is not a comprehensive account of ASD.

Question 3

Real World Applications?

Answer 3

• psychologists and educationalists have devised many ways in which people with ASD can be helped to mindread i.e to recognise the feelings and thoughts of others.
• Another example is the ‘social stories’ intervention of carol gray (Gray and White, 2001), the intervention is based around short stories that highlight social cues and varying perspectives in everyday social situations.
• These stories are used as teaching aids to help the individual with ASD understand the unwritten rules of interpersonal interaction, and especially the thoughts and feelings of various characters in the stories.
• The elements of this intervention are based firmly on a ToM account of ASD. This explanation has been fertile ground for the development of creative ways of helping people with ASD overcome the social behaviour deficits that are such a debilitating feature of the disorder.

Question 4

Ineffectiveness of ToM interventions.

Answer 4

• Although a theory can give rise to many real-world applications, such as interventions to help people with ASD, this doesn’t automatically mean that those interventions work.
• They still have to be tested. Sue Fletcher-Watson et al (2014) conducted a review of real world applications based on the ToM account of ASD. The review included 22 randomised control trials, in which effectiveness has been tested by allocating people with ASD to either the ToM intervention or a control group.
• The researchers concluded that there is some evidence that ToM can be developed through intervention. Unfortunately, these improvements were short lived and did not generalise to situations beyond the ones in which the skills were learned.
• However, the researchers also noted that their conclusions were limited because the quality of many intervention studies is so poor.
• This highlights the pressing need for high quality research tests of ToM interventions.