Poznyak Elena, Rochat Lucien, Badoud Deborah, Meuleman Ben, Debbané Martin
Developmental Clinical Psychology Research Unit, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Specialized Facility in Behavioral Addiction ReConnecte, Department of Mental Health and Psychiatry, University Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2025 Aug;78(8):1707-1720. doi: 10.1177/17470218241311415. Epub 2025 Jan 8.
Mentalizing involves a number of psychological processes designed to appraise self and others from different points of view. Factors affecting the flexibility in the ability to switch between self-other representations and perspectives remain yet unclear. In this study, we sought to (a) assess individual variability in processing and switching between self and other-oriented mental representations and perspectives in a sample of typically developing youths and (b) examine how age and executive functioning may affect this switching process. A total of 88 adolescents and 163 young adults completed the Self-Other Switching Task, a new computerised personality trait attribution paradigm. Measures of sustained attention, working memory, and inhibition were used to assess executive functioning. Linear mixed models showed that participants were faster at making attributions from the self-perspective and when referring to the self. They were also slower to disengage/switch from the self-perspective and the self-representation. Whereas there were no age differences in self-other switching efficiency per se, adolescents were slower than adults on trials involving appraisals of the other from the self-perspective. Importantly, higher verbal working memory scores were associated with better performance on incongruent trials and with switching scores. This study demonstrates the utility of a new experimental task permitting to tease apart the effects of self-other appraisal and perspective switching within a single paradigm. Our behavioural results highlight a self-cost observed in switching between representations and perspectives and emphasise the roles of age and working memory in the simultaneous processing of self- and other-oriented information.
心理化涉及一系列旨在从不同角度评估自我和他人的心理过程。影响自我与他人表征及视角之间转换能力灵活性的因素尚不清楚。在本研究中，我们试图：（a）在一组发育正常的青少年样本中评估自我与他人导向的心理表征及视角之间处理和转换的个体差异；（b）考察年龄和执行功能如何影响这一转换过程。共有88名青少年和163名青年完成了自我-他人转换任务，这是一种新的计算机化人格特质归因范式。使用持续注意力、工作记忆和抑制的测量方法来评估执行功能。线性混合模型显示，参与者从自我视角进行归因以及提及自我时速度更快。他们从自我视角和自我表征中脱离/转换也更慢。虽然自我-他人转换效率本身不存在年龄差异，但在涉及从自我视角评估他人的试验中，青少年比成年人速度慢。重要的是，较高的言语工作记忆分数与在不一致试验中的更好表现以及转换分数相关。本研究证明了一种新的实验任务的效用，该任务允许在单一范式中区分自我-他人评估和视角转换的影响。我们的行为结果突出了在表征和视角转换中观察到的自我成本，并强调了年龄和工作记忆在同时处理自我和他人导向信息中的作用。
