The cognitive basis of social ability in adolescents: Social motivation and Theory of Mind

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A moment's reflection on friends or colleagues leads to the strong intuition that some people have better social skills than others, and this intuition is supported by measures showing both typical and atypical variation in everyday social ability (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 2013; Constantino et al., 2002). However, the underlying reasons for such variation are unclear. One possibility is that we might vary in our "theory of mind" (ToM); the ability to think about what others see, know, think, want and intend. ToM has been heavily researched in children, is a fundamental basis of social interaction and communication, and is distinctively impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which is associated with social communication impairments. However, the traditional approach to ToM has been narrowly focussed on the conceptual competence in children up to 6 years, so we know little about how development continues, or how the ability to use our ToM interacts with motivation to produce variation in social ability. Investigating these relationships in the proposed research is a critical test of the utility of the ToM approach for understanding social development in middle childhood and beyond and will provide insights into the social impairments observed in individuals with ASD, who show deficits in both ToM and social motivation. The project will draw upon exciting advances in tasks to test ToM abilities and will use a state-of-the-art approach to measurement and data modelling. It will be the first examination of the relations between ToM, social motivation and social competence in any age group. A critical age-range (11- 15 years) when adolescents are gaining proficiency in the use of basic ToM abilities, but social competence is undergoing dramatic change, will be targeted. By testing these adolescents on clinically relevant measures the work will provide new hypotheses for future work on social difficulties in ASD. This project will enable a sophisticated analysis approach whereby structural equation modeling allows key factors (ToM and motivation) to be modeled as latent variables. Previous research leads to the expectation that both higher social motivation and better ToM performance will predict higher social competence. This work will provide the strongest evidence to date on the role of social motivation, and critically, will make it possible to test whether the effects of ToM and motivation are statistically unique or related. An important possibility is that more socially motivated individuals use their ToM more effectively and so are more socially capable. This would be evidenced by ToM mediating the effect of social motivation on social ability.