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<p>Theory of mind (ToM) and empathic responding are thought to rely on the joint contribution of cognitive and affective processes, and the corresponding complex neural networks involved in these diverse cognitive and affective functions. Individuals with mood disorders demonstrate deficits in many of the same cognitive and affective processes thought to mediate ToM and empathy, and demonstrate structural and functional changes in the neural regions that subserve these social cognitive domains. We examined ToM and empathic responding in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD) using standardized measures of social cognitive responding. Patients with BD and MDD with sub-syndromal depressive symptoms showed deficits on a cognitively challenging task that required them to integrate two perspectives simultaneously (second-order ToM stimuli). Sub-syndromal patients with BD also showed a trend toward poor performance on a less demanding first-order ToM task; no such deficit was observed for sub-syndromal MDD patients. Patients with BD were also impaired at discriminating mental states from pictures of eyes and in making complex social judgments. Both patient groups reported reduced levels of cognitive empathy, but differed in response on affective empathy domains. Specifically, whereas the BD group reported higher levels of distress in response to others' negative experiences, the MDD group reported less feelings of care and concern in response to another’s emotional experience. Across the BD studies, impaired ToM and empathic responding were found to be associated with poor social functioning and increased depressive symptoms, but the influence of illness burden variables on performance was variable. Across the MDD studies, the associations between social cognitive performance, illness variables, and social functioning were inconsistent. Taken together, our findings indicate that patients with mood disorders demonstrate altered ToM and empathic responding that may contribute to the difficulties in social communication observed in these patient populations.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Yes / To understand the executive demands of the false-belief (FB) task relative to an alternative theory-of-mind (or mechanical causality) task, picture sequencing, the present study used path analyses. One hundred and sixty-six children between 3 and 6 years old completed the FB and picture-sequencing tasks, three executive function tasks (updating, inhibition, and shifting), and the receptive language test. The model with the best fit indicated that FB performance had a direct contribution from shifting of attention and inhibitory control, which was independent of the significant contribution made by picture sequencing. This model indicates that FB inference requires more executive processing than picture sequencing, which is used as an alternative task to measure theory of mind. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? The majority of researchers use the false-belief task to assess mentalizing ability in young children. Sources of information used in various different mentalizing tasks require different levels of cognitive demand. Many executive functions (EFs) are involved in children's judgements of false belief. What does this study add? A statistical model was created to compare processing requirements of false-belief and picture-sequencing tasks. The model supported the claim that the false-belief task involves considerably more than just mentalizing. Shifting the focus of attention was an EF that was found to be a key component of performance in the false-belief task. / Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science: KAKENHI Grant No. 16K04327.

Yes / Posed facial expressions of actors have often been used as stimuli to induce mental state inferences, in order to investigate 'Theory of Mind' processes. However, such stimuli make it difficult to determine whether perceivers are using a basic or more elaborated mentalizing strategy. The current study used as stimuli covert recordings of target individuals who viewed various emotional expressions, which caused them to spontaneously mimic these expressions. Perceivers subsequently judged these subtle emotional expressions of the targets: in one condition ('classification') participants were instructed to classify the target's expression (i.e. match it to a sample) and in another condition ('retrodicting') participants were instructed to retrodict (i.e. infer which emotional expression the target was viewing). When instructed to classify, participants showed more prevalent activations in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) at earlier and mid-latency ERP components N170, P200 and P300-600. By contrast, when instructed to retrodict participants showed enhanced late frontal and fronto-temporal ERPs (N800-1000), with more sustained activity over the right than the left hemisphere. These findings reveal different cortical processes involved when retrodicting about a facial expression compared to merely classifying it, despite comparable performance on the behavioral task. / Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) Study Visit Grant; Young Researcher Support Grant DRM/2014-02; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SCHN 1481/2-1); Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FOR 1097)

Mentalistic inference, the process of deducing others’ mental states from behaviour, is a key element of social interactions, especially when challenges arise. Just by observing an action or listening to a verbal description of it, adults and infants are able to make robust and rapid inferences about an agent’s intentions, desires, and beliefs. This thesis considers perspectives from Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) and large language models, specifically GPT models. Individuals with ASDs struggle to read intentions from movements, but the mechanisms underlying these difficulties remain unknown. In a set of experiments, we employed combined motion tracking, psychophysics, and computational analyses to examine intention reading in ASDs with single-trial resolution. Single-trial analyses revealed that challenges in intention reading arise from both differences in kinematics between typically developing individuals and those with ASD, and a diminished sensitivity in reading intentions to variations in movement kinematics. This aligns with the idea that internal readout models are tuned to specific action kinematics, supporting the role of sensorimotor processes in shaping cognitive understanding and emphasizing motor resonance, a key aspect of embodied cognition. Targeted trainings may enhance and improve this ability. In a second set of experiments, we compared Theory of Mind, a core feature of mentalistic inference, in GPT models and a large sample of human participants. We found that GPT models exhibited human-level abilities in detecting indirect requests, false beliefs, and misdirection, but failed on faux pas. Rigorous hypothesis testing enabled us to show that this failure was apparent and was linked to a cautious approach in drawing conclusions rather than from an inference deficit. Collectively, the results presented in this thesis suggest that the convergence of insights from clinical research and advancements in technology is essential for fostering a more inclusive understanding of mentalistic inferences.

Perception of moral violations and people’s misbehaviours are crucial elements that allow people to live in the society. The literature suggested that both explicit and implicit processes are involved in the moral cognition (Cameron et al., 2012). However still nowadays, the majority of the literature focused only on the explicit aspects of morality, while scarce attention was given to the study of implicit moral attitudes (Cameron et al., 2018). Furthermore, researchers on morality are currently attracting by the investigation of moral cognition in people with impairments in social cognition (e.g., people with autism spectrum disorder; ASD) who may process the moral violations differently compared neurotypical people (see e.g., Gallese, 2006), However, this line of research is at the beginning stage, and the use of implicit measures to understand the mechanisms underpinning the morality in autism (or in people with high autistic traits) have not yet been considered in previous studies. The present dissertation aimed to investigate important aspects of moral cognition that currently are still under-investigated in literature, offering a wider view on implicit aspects of morality in autism. Through six experiments, this work wanted to provide new empirical findings concerning the implicit mechanisms underpinning moral cognition in both neurotypical and autistic people without intellectual disability. Experiment 1 and 2 According to Moral Foundation Theory (Graham et al., 2013) specific emotions are associated to different types of moral violations. For instance, when people perceive that a victim is physically or emotionally harmed by someone else, they feel anger against the perpetrator. By contrast, people feel disgust when they perceive that someone ate inedible food or made blasphemous practices (Haidt et al., 1993). However, empirical finding that assessed the link between different types of moral violations and specific emotions showed mixed results. Indeed, it was suggested that other important factors might also modulate the relations between different moral violations and emotions (Atari et al., 2020; Kemper &amp; Newheiser, 2018). Specifically, the benign violation hypothesis (McGraw &amp; Warren, 2010) claimed that sometimes people could perceive moral violations as amusing, and this specific emotion seems elicited by specific contextual (e.g., psychological distance) as well as interpersonal factors (e.g., humor traits). However, previous studies never tested whether people perceive amusement in response to all types of moral violation, or whether amusement emerged only in response to specific norm violations (e.g., purity violations). Furthermore recently, Dempsey and colleagues (2020a) emphasized the importance to test the assumptions of Moral Foundation Theory in autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). Interviewing six autistic participants, the authors found that the participants endorsed all moral domains as morally relevant. However, the relations between emotional reaction and moral domains in autism have never been tested, as well as whether autistic people perceive moral violations as benign and amusing. In the first two experiments of this thesis, it was assessed the amusement reaction in response to different types of moral violations (purity vs. harm) and extending such investigation involving a group of autistic participants. Furthermore, the studies conducted so far on moral cognition has prevalently used explicit methodology. By contrast, in these experiments it was assessed the emotional reaction in response to different types of moral violations analysing the spontaneous facial expressions in neurotypical people (experiment 1), and the cardiac response of both typical and autistic individuals (experiment 2). The aim of these experiments was to investigate whether neurotypical people perceive specific types of moral violations as benign and amusing, and then whether autistic people expressed different emotions compared neurotypical people in response to different types of moral violations. Experiment 3, 4 and 5 As opposite of Moral Foundation Theory, the Dyadic Model claimed that a sine qua non for moral perception is the implicit activation of harm (Gray et al., 2012). In other words, always immorality automatically activates perceptions of harm regardless of someone is harmed (acts which involve physical and emotional damage; harm violations) or not (i.e., acts which involve impure and degradation behaviour; purity violations). Indeed, empirical evidence suggested that, during the reading of a scenario depicting a harmless moral violation in the domain of purity, people nevertheless implicitly infer that harm was involved. Across three experiments, we tested whether ostensibly harmless moral violations activated implicitly the harm concept. In all these three experiments the participants’ implicit attitude in response to moral violations was tested by using the affective misattribution paradigm (AMP; Payne et al., 2014), which is one of the most reliable methods to assess individual unconscious mental processes in psychology (Znanewitz et al., 2018). Specifically, Experiment 3 aimed to replicate previous findings which highlighted the implicit role of harm in response to harmless moral violations (Gray et al., 2014). Experiment 4 extended previous results with an investigation aimed to verify whether people with high autistic traits showed less implicit activation of harm in response to harmless scenarios than people with low autistic traits. Finally, Experiment 5 aimed to investigate whether autistic people (without intellectual disability) implicitly activated the harm concept in response to harmless scenarios as well as neurotypicals. Experiment 6 The majority of the studies which investigated the moral cognition in autism started to the premise that autistic people have a selective impairment in Theory of Mind (ToM; Moran et al., 2011), which is also a fundamental skill to understand the moral behaviours (e.g., Hamlin, 2015). However, the literature is far to show the role of Theory of Mind in the moral processing. Recently, it was suggested that ToM is a cognitive skill that involves both explicit and implicit processes (e.g., Southgate et al., 2007). The born of new implicit measures to assess the ToM brought an initial enthusiasm in this area of study. For instance, studies on clinical psychology, using both explicit and implicit ToM measures in order to understand selective ToM difficulties by autistic individuals without intellectual disability showed that, although this population presented high performance to explicit ToM tasks, they showed lower performance in the newer implicit ToM tasks compared to neurotypical participants (e.g., Schuwerk et al., 2015; Senju et al., 2009). Late unfortunately, these interesting results were put into question by other studies, which argued against the reliability of these new implicit measures (Kulke et al., 2018b). Moreover, another important gap in implicit ToM literature was that, while previous models in developmental psychology and psychopathology have suggested a link between attachment and the development of ToM, the relationship between attachment and implicit ToM has been so far neglected. In this experiment, we assessed both implicit and explicit mental state attribution, by means of a new implicit ToM task, as well as some attachment dimensions, comparing a group of autistic participants, without intellectual disability, and a control group. Specifically, in this experiment it was investigated participants’ spontaneous anticipatory look in response to false beliefs tasks using the eye-tracking methodology (one of the most used implicit ToM paradigms in literature). This study aimed to investigate the Theory of Mind (ToM) at both explicit and implicit level (Southgate et al., 2007), investigating possible differences between neurotypical individuals and autistic people. Furthermore, in the same study it was also investigated the link between the participants’ attachment and the explicit and implicit ToM skills. Moral cognition is a complex object of study that should be investigated with a multi-dimensional approach. In the experiments described in this thesis it was proposed a combined methodology that allowed to gather both explicit and implicit cognitive and emotional mechanisms that stay at the root of the moral judgment. Thanks to this approach it was found that deliberate and involuntary processes did not present convergent responses in the moral cognition of participants. Indeed, self-reported emotions seem to show divergent responses compared to the spontaneous facial expressions and the cardiac response to moral violations. These results support extant literature that raises concerns about the intuitionist assumptions of the moral cognition based on the assessment of only explicit responses of participants (e.g., Gutierrez &amp; Giner-Sorolla, 2007; Nosek, 2007). Furthermore, this thesis highlighted the importance of studying the moral cognition in people affected by the autism spectrum disorder. Despite the social impairments that this neurodevelopmental disorder presents, we found that autistic people with cognitive level in average with the typical population, did not show any differences compared to the control group in both explicit and implicit mechanisms of moral cognition. These interesting findings may bring important theoretical reflections in moral and clinical psychology.

Yes / Evidence has shown that older adults have lower accuracy in Theory-of-Mind (ToM) tasks compared to young adults, but we are still unclear whether the difficulty in decoding mental states in older adults stems from not looking at the critical areas, and more so from the ageing Asian population. Most ToM studies use static images or short vignettes to measure ToM but these stimuli are dissimilar to everyday social interactions. We investigated this question using a dynamic task that measured both accuracy and error types, and examined the links between accuracy and error types to eye gaze fixation at critical areas (e.g. eyes, mouth, body). A total of 82 participants (38 older, 44 young adults) completed the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition task on the eye tracker. Results showed that older adults had a lower overall accuracy with more errors in the ipo-ToM (under-mentalising) and no-ToM (lack of mentalisation) conditions compared to young adults. We analysed the eye gaze data using principal components analysis and found that increasing age and looking less at the face were related to lower MASC accuracy in our participants. Our findings suggest that ageing deficits in ToM are linked to a visual attention deficit specific to the perception of socially relevant nonverbal cues. / This study was funded by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (FRGS/1/2016/SS05/SYUC/03/2) awarded to M.H.Y.