Aykan Simge, Nalçacı Erhan
Department of Physiology, Ankara University School of Medicine, Ankara, Turkey.
Front Psychol. 2018 Aug 13;9:1470. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01470. eCollection 2018.
Theory of Mind (ToM) may be defined as the ability to understand the mental states, such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions, of others. Impairment of ToM ability leads to disorders with pathologies in social skills, such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. In addition to differences in ToM ability among patient populations, there is variation between neurotypical individuals. Unfortunately, ToM tasks are usually developed for children or patients with cognitive disorders and cannot detect variations in healthy adults. As an alternative tool, humor may be used. Humor plays a role in social communication and requires many different cognitive functions. Humor is believed to represent complex high-order cognitive processes. There are numerous types of humor; the most complex type is considered ToM humor, where an understanding of social/emotional content is necessary. Given the need for a ToM assessment test suitable for healthy adult populations, we developed a test for measuring humor comprehension and appreciation, with and without ToM content (ToM-HCAT). The present ToM-HCAT test is a performance test consisting of cartoons. The test measures perceived funniness, reaction time to perceived funniness decision, and meaning inference. Cartoons were selected after pilot studies involving 44 participants. Subscales were constituted according to expert views and confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis ( = 135). Goodness of fit values for the final 35-item test were acceptable to excellent: GFI = 0.97; AGFI = 0.97; NFI = 0.97; RFI = 0.97, and SRMR = 0.067. Both categories were internally consistent (α = 0.84, α = 0.94). External validity was assessed against autistic traits. One hundred and three participants completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient and were grouped by +0.5 standard deviations from the mean as high in autistic traits. The meaning-inference scores of the subscale with the ToM cartoons were significantly lower ( = 0.034) for the high autistic traits group, providing evidence of external validity. In conclusion, we developed and validated a test for assessment of ToM by humor comprehension and appreciation. We believe that the present test will be useful for the detection of variations in ToM ability in the healthy adult population.
心理理论（ToM）可定义为理解他人心理状态的能力，这些心理状态包括信念、欲望、意图和情感等。心理理论能力受损会导致社交技能出现病态的障碍，如自闭症谱系障碍和精神分裂症。除了患者群体之间心理理论能力存在差异外，神经典型个体之间也存在差异。不幸的是，心理理论任务通常是为儿童或认知障碍患者设计的，无法检测健康成年人的差异。作为一种替代工具，可以使用幽默。幽默在社交沟通中发挥作用，需要许多不同的认知功能。幽默被认为代表复杂的高阶认知过程。幽默有多种类型；最复杂的类型被认为是心理理论幽默，即需要理解社会/情感内容。鉴于需要一种适合健康成年人群体的心理理论评估测试，我们开发了一种用于测量有无心理理论内容（ToM-HCAT）的幽默理解和欣赏能力的测试。目前的ToM-HCAT测试是一项由卡通组成的表现测试。该测试测量感知到的有趣程度、对感知到的有趣程度做出判断的反应时间以及意义推断。卡通是在涉及44名参与者的预试验研究后挑选出来的。子量表是根据专家意见构建的，并通过验证性因素分析得到确认（n = 135）。最终35个项目测试的拟合优度值从可接受到优秀：GFI = 0.97；AGFI = 0.97；NFI = 0.97；RFI = 0.97，SRMR = 0.067。两个类别在内部都是一致的（α = 0.84，α = 0.94）。根据自闭症特征评估外部效度。103名参与者完成了自闭症谱系商数测试，并以高于平均水平0.5个标准差的标准被归为自闭症特征高分组。对于自闭症特征高分组，带有心理理论卡通的子量表的意义推断得分显著更低（p = 0.034），这为外部效度提供了证据。总之，我们开发并验证了一种通过幽默理解和欣赏来评估心理理论的测试。我们相信目前的测试将有助于检测健康成年人群体中心理理论能力的差异。
