A Further Look at Reading the Mind in the Eyes-Child Version: Association With Fluid Intelligence, Receptive Language, and Intergenerational Transmission in Typically Developing School-Aged Children

Abstract

A number of tasks have been developed to measure the affective theory of mind (ToM), nevertheless, recent studies found that different affective ToM tasks do not correlate with each other, suggesting that further studies on affective ToM and its measurement are needed. More in-depth knowledge of the tools that are available to assess affective ToM is needed to decide which should be used in research and in clinical practice, and how to interpret results. The current study focuses on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) primarily to investigate in a sample of 112 children the currently unexplored relationships in middle childhood between performance on the RMET and fluid intelligence. Relationships with receptive vocabulary, age, and sex were also investigated. Moreover, because studying the family's influence on children mentalization could have important implications in developing prevention and treatment interventions, this study offers a novel contribution to the field by exploring the family's influence on children's RMET performance. Although significant positive correlations were found among RMET-C performance, fluid intelligence, and receptive language, regression analysis revealed that fluid intelligence was the only predictor. No family influence was found on children's RMET performance. On the whole, results from the current study offer some support to the hypothesis that RMET-C is not a “pure” ToM task, specifically the effect of fluid intelligence on RMET performance should be taken into account when RMET is used both in research and in the clinical setting.

Difficulties in social cognitive functioning among pediatric patients with muscular dystrophies

“…In the case of Verbal task and TM total score of NEPSY-II, it has been hypothesized that general intelligence could be influencing the response to some items, such as those related to metaphors or idioms, in which a greater command of cognitive abilities and specific verbal skills for its successful performance is required. Similarly, some authors have pointed out that RMET-C might not be a “pure” ToM task because of the effect that fluid intelligence has on its realization ( Mary et al, 2016 ; Rosso and Riolfo, 2020 ). However, the level of intelligence was not a determining covariate for the rest of the SC variables where a priori group differences were found, such as facial emotion recognition and ToM tasks, in which compensatory contextual cues are given or involve social knowledge that is much easier to access and more representative of children’s everyday lives ( Nawaz et al, 2023 ).…”

Response format changes the reading the mind in the eyes test performance of autistic and non-autistic adults

“…One widely used measure of theory of mind is the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, et al, 2001 ), which presents participants with photographs of pairs of eyes and asks them to identify the emotion displayed by each pair of eyes from four response options. Concerns have been raised about the validity of the measure ( Gernsbacher & Yergeau, 2019 ), with some researchers suggesting that it does not actually measure theory of mind, but rather, emotion recognition ( Oakley et al, 2016 ), intelligence ( Rosso & Riolfo, 2020 ), and vocabulary ( Olderbak et al, 2015 ).…”