Making “Mindreading” Easier on the Mind: A New Version of a Theory of Mind Assessment for Older Adults
Back in June 2020, a paper that I had been working on for a while, in completion of my PhD thesis, finally got accepted and published in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. In this paper, we looked at the Reading the Minds in the Eyes Test (RMET), an assessment meant to measure theory of mind in children and young adults with autism spectrum disorders. We developed and validated a short-form version of the RMET that was more suited for assessing theory of mind in older adults.
Theory of mind, also known as cognitive empathy or “mindreading”, is one of the many social skills that we collectively refer to as social cognition. Social cognition is the set of skills and abilities we use to communicate and navigate in social environments. Specifically, theory of mind is our ability to infer what someone else is thinking or feeling without them telling us, by reading their emotions and/or gathering contextual cues from the environment.
Picture this: you’re in a group of people, and you turn to one of your friends and ask them a question to start a new line of conversation. Upon hearing the question, you see them grow silent and look away, their face dropping and blushing, and the group grows silent. We might infer from their behavior, and the kind of question we asked them (“Didn’t I see you at Mardi Gras this year?”), that they might be embarrassed by this question, and that their primary thought would be that they don’t want to address this. This informs our behavior; ideally, one would act appropriately by not pursuing the question, changing the subject, and perhaps making a mental note to approach the person privately to see if everything is okay with them. Without this ability to infer their discomfort, one might have attempted to pursue the question further in search for a response, and the person might be forced to confront the issue publicly against their preferences. That’s just a little crash course on theory of mind right there.
The RMET is a 36-item assessment, originally meant to assess performance in theory of mind in people with autism spectrum disorders, a group that classically have difficulties reading social cues. It’s since been used in other settings and groups of people, such as people with schizophrenia and people with dementia. In fact, we at the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) have been using this assessment in the more recent waves of the longitudinal Sydney Memory and Ageing Study (MAS). In doing so, and in discussing our findings with other researchers working in ageing and dementia, we started to get the feeling that participants’ experiences with this test, and also the test’s performance in measuring theory of mind in older adults, could be improved. Annecdotally, some of our participants found it a little long and a little difficult. Thus, we had the thought of shortening it by looking at the data we already had from Sydney MAS, and seeing which of the items within the RMET were more useful than others. That way, we could isolate those items and shorten the scale while not breaking its ability to measure theory of mind in older adults.
This paper was the result of countless discussions with my fellow co-authors, especially Sarah Grainger and my supervisors Perminder Sachdev and Julie Henry, me boucing ideas off of anyone that would bother to listen (thank you, Aloysius), countless sleepless nights of writing and programming, and running machine learning algorithms wrongly, thus kicking my laptop into overdrive and just about turning my CPU into a space heater. I’m glad to be able to say that this paper, which is set to be Section 2 of my PhD thesis, is done and dusted for now.
Click here to see the full paper in Int J Geriatr Psychiatr.
Excerpts from full press release dated 14 July 2020
Researchers from UNSW Sydney’s Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA), led by PhD student Russell Chander, have developed an enhanced version of a popular test for theory of mind, making it shorter and more effective for use with older adults.
Under the supervision of CHeBA’s Co-Director, Scientia Professor Perminder Sachdev, Mr Chander and the Social Cognition Ageing study team assessed data collected from 295 participants in (Sydney MAS)… to shorten the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test to a recommended 21 items.
The study team hopes that by making the test easier on older adults, it will help encourage more researchers and clinicians to use it with their patients and participants. They also hope to use this assessment in future CHeBA studies, to help improve participants’ experiences with research.
