An opposite pattern of cognitive performance in autistic individuals with and without alexithymia.
This publication is included in the Autistic Autism Scholarship Project. one author of this publication is identified as autistic in the project.
About the autistic author markerRødgaard, E. M., Jensen, K., & Mottron, L. (2019). An opposite pattern of cognitive performance in autistic individuals with and without alexithymia. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 128(7), 735-737. https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000408
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Authors
Abstract
Oakley, Brewer, Bird, and Catmur (2016) investigated whether the Reading the Minds in the Eyes Test (RMET) measures emotion recognition rather than theory of mind (ToM). To explore this, 19 participants with autism and 23 controls, matched on alexithymia traits, were tested with the RMET, as well as the ToM Movie for Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC). The authors found a significant difference between the two groups on the MASC but not on the RMET, but dividing the groups based on alexithymia resulted in a significantly lower performance on the RMET but not on the MASC for the alexithymia group. Therefore, they conclude that difficulties on the RMET are associated with alexithymia, not autism, while difficulties on the MASC are associated with autism, not alexithymia. Here we investigated what seems to be opposite patterns of performance on the two cognitive tasks within the autism group, which modified the authors' interpretation of their data. This was examined by correlating the alexithymia scores with the RMET and a subscale of the MASC scores, referred to as the cognitive MASC. We found a negative correlation between the alexithymia score and the RMET score while also finding a positive correlation between the alexithymia score and the cognitive MASC score in the autism group. Such an opposite pattern of performance suggests the presence of distinct patterns of ToM difficulties within the autism group. This also indicates that, contrary to what is reported by Oakley et al., there is an association between alexithymia and the MASC within the autism group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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Christiane Montag , André Ehrlich , Kathrin Neuhaus , Isabel Dziobek , Hauke R. Heekeren , Andreas Heinz et al. (2010). Theory of mind impairments in euthymic bipolar patients . Journal of Affective Disorders, 123(1-3), 264-269. Elsevier BV.OpenAlex
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Isabel Dziobek , Stefan Fleck , Kimberley Rogers , Oliver T. Wolf , Antonio Convit (2006). The ‘amygdala theory of autism’ revisited: Linking structure to behavior . Neuropsychologia, 44(10), 1891-1899. Elsevier BV.Type: Article DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.02.005 OpenAlex: https://openalex.org/W2114116770OpenAlex
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Simone Shamay-Tsoory , Hagai Harari , Ohad Szepsenwol , Yechiel Levkovitz (2009). Neuropsychological Evidence of Impaired Cognitive Empathy in Euthymic Bipolar Disorder . The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 21(1), 59-67. American Psychiatric Association Publishing.OpenAlex
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Bethany Oakley , Rebecca Brewer , Geoffrey Bird , Caroline Catmur (2016). Theory of mind is not theory of emotion: A cautionary note on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 125(6), 818-823. American Psychological Association (APA).OpenAlex
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Timo Brockmeyer , Judith Pellegrino , Hannah Münch , Wolfgang Herzog , Isabell Dziobek , Hans‐Christoph Friederich (2016). Social cognition in anorexia nervosa: Specific difficulties in decoding emotional but not nonemotional mental states . International Journal of Eating Disorders, 49(9), 883-890. Wiley.OpenAlex