Assessing Deictic Relational Responding in Social Anhedonia: A Functional Approach to the Development of Theory of Mind Impairments

The current study aimed to compare deictic relational responding and Theory of Mind (ToM) performances in 60 non-clinical young adults with a profile of high versus low social anhedonia in order to investigate a possible link between social anhedonia and ToM functioning. The results indicated that social anhedonic participants were less accurate than controls (matched on age, gender and general intellectual competencies) on ToM tasks (P<.001) and on complex deictic relational responding (P=.05). Accuracy on reversing deictic relations explains 52 % of the variance of ToM performance (P=.000). These findings support the RFT approach to ToM and suggest the critical role of social contact for the remediation of deficits. Premack and Woodruff (1978) have proposed the term “Theory of Mind ” (ToM) to refer to one’s ability to infer the beliefs, intentions and thoughts of others in order to explain and predict their behavior. Understanding how ToM operates has been the subject of debate for more than twenty years in cognitive psychology, but has only recently been studied in behavior analysis. Although th