RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Enhancing the precision of our understanding about mentalizing in adults with autism
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 034454
DO 10.1101/034454
A1 Michael V. Lombardo
A1 Meng-Chuan Lai
A1 Bonnie Auyeung
A1 Rosemary J. Holt
A1 Carrie Allison
A1 Paula Smith
A1 Bhismadev Chakrabarti
A1 Amber N. V. Ruigrok
A1 John Suckling
A1 Edward T. Bullmore
A1 MRC AIMS Consortium
A1 Christine Ecker
A1 Michael C. Craig
A1 Declan G. M. Murphy
A1 Francesa Happé
A1 Simon Baron-Cohen
YR 2015
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/12/15/034454.abstract
AB Difficulties in mentalizing or theory of mind are common autism spectrum conditions (ASC). However, heterogeneity in mentalizing ability between individuals with ASC is considerable, particularly in adulthood. Parsing this heterogeneity to come to more precise understanding of which individuals have difficulty has important implications, particularly for individualized approaches in clinical and translational research applications. Here we utilize unsupervised hierarchical clustering to identify data-driven subgroups within ASC based on performance on an advanced mentalizing test, the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ Test (RMET). We find evidence for 2 discrete ASC subgroups that can be replicably identified across two large independent datasets. The first subgroup shows clear difficulty on the RMET, with an effect size difference compared to typically-developing controls (TD) of greater than 3 standard deviations. In contrast, the second subgroup shows little to no difficulty on the RMET compared to TD individuals. These ASC subgroups are not systematically different across a range of other variables including sex/gender, age, depression or anxiety symptoms, autistic traits, trait empathy, and autism symptom severity. Verbal IQ is slightly lower in the impaired ASC subgroup, but covarying for this does not change the effect of large difficulties in mentalizing in this subgroup. These insights enable a more precise understanding of mentalizing and may have important implications for future work that takes a more individualized approach to clinical assessment and treatment. Identification of these subgroups may also facilitate work examining multiple biological mechanisms underlying ASC in translational research.