Knowing me, knowing you: Spontaneous use of mentalistic language for self and other in autism

Abstract

Recent studies on mentalizing have shown that autistic individuals who pass explicit mentalizing tasks may still have difficulties with implicit mentalizing tasks. This study explores implicit mentalizing by examining spontaneous speech that is likely to contain mentalistic expressions. The spontaneous production of meta-statements provides a clear measure for implicit mentalizing that is unlikely to be learned through experience. We examined the self- and other-descriptions of highly verbally able autistic and non-autistic adults in terms of their spontaneous use of mentalistic language and meta-representational utterances through quantitative and qualitative analysis. We devised a hierarchical coding system that allowed us to study the types of statements produced in comparable conditions for the self and for a familiar other. The descriptions of autistic participants revealed less mentalistic content relating to psychological traits and meta-statements. References to physical traits were similar between groups. Within each group, participants produced a similar pattern of types of mental utterance across ‘self’ and ‘other’ conditions. This suggests that autistic individuals show a unique pattern of mental-state-representation for both self and other. Meta-statements add a degree of complexity to self- and other-descriptions and to the understanding of mental states; their reduction in autism provides evidence for implicit mentalizing difficulties. Lay abstract Autistic people can have difficulties in understanding non-autistic people’s mental states such as beliefs, emotions and intentions. Although autistic adults may learn to overcome difficulties in understanding of explicit (overt) mental states, they may nevertheless struggle with implicit (indirect) understanding of mental states. This study explores how spontaneous language is used in order to specifically point to this implicit (indirect) understanding of mental states. In particular, our study compares the spontaneous statements that were used in descriptions of oneself and a familiar other person. Here, we found that autistic and non-autistic adults were comparable in the number of statements about physical traits they made. In contrast, non-autistic adults made more statements about mentalistic traits (about the mental including psychological traits, relationship traits and statements reflecting about these) both for the self and the other. Non-autistic and autistic adults showed no difference in the number of statements about relationships but in the number of statements about psychological traits and especially in the statements reflecting on these. Each group showed a similar pattern of kinds of statements for the self and for the other person. This suggests that autistic individuals show the same unique pattern of description in mentalistic terms for the self and another person. This study also indicates that investigating spontaneous use of language, especially for statements reflecting about mental states, enables us to look into difficulties with implicit (indirect) understanding of mental states.