Affective mentalizing in children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder at school age

Difficulties in the capacities of inferring and attributing cognitions and emotions to oneself or other people –referred to as those of mentalizing - are very consistently documented in subjects with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These socio-cognitive capacities have typically been shown to be impaired in ASD while their impairment is proposed to lie behind the symptoms of ASD.The purpose of the study is to examine affective mentalizing inArabic-speaking children with ASD, in comparison with children with typical development (TD).Thirty-six children with ASD and 36 TD children, aged 8 to 12 years-old, took the RMET (child) tasks to assess and explore their affective mentalizing.The results indicated that children with ASD perform worse in affective mentalizing than do TD children. Compared to the latter, they have clear difficulties in affective mentalizing. Except for differences in sex, factors of age and severity of autistic symptoms affect the affective mentalizing performance of subjects with ASD.In general, difficulties in affective mentalizing are a feature of ASD. In this context, our study continues to propose to train and educate affective mentalizing skills in subjects with ASD in order to reduce the severity of their autistic symptoms and to facilitate their social integration.