Measuring the building blocks of mentalizing performance across mental disorders

Bukowski, Henryk [UCL] Bigot, Alix [UCL] Amadieu, Camille [UCL] Pham, Thierry [Service de Psychopathologie Légale, UMons] Saloppé, Xavier [Centre de Recherche en Défense Sociale, CRDS] Tiberi, Luca [Service de Psychopathologie Légale, UMons] Nandrino, Jean-Louis [SCALAb, Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, University of Lille] Peeters, Jean-Charles [UCL] de Timary, Philippe [UCL] et al.[show all]

Our capacity to understand others and ourselves determines our interpersonal functioning, our well-being and our mental health. As matter of fact, socio-cognitive deficits are frequent among patients with mental health disorders, such as alcohol dependence, psychopathy, anorexia, and schizophrenia. However, reports of these deficits are inconsistent, and we identified 3 potential reasons: (1) The inconsistency in theories of mentalizing as there is a lack of consensus and of interest in defining the basic and universal processes underlying mentalizing performance, that is, the building blocks of mentalizing. (2) The inconsistency in the measurement of mentalizing, with an overreliance upon self-report scales and upon single-score tasks that each tap into a specific type of mental state inference. (3) The inconsistency that is the actual heterogeneity in terms of socio-cognitive profile among patients of the same population. I will present our attempt to address these 3 issues: First, a novel multidimensional framework that distinguishes the basic processes contributing to mentalizing and organizes them under two central dimensions: self-other distinction and to self-other priority. Second, a practical psychometric tool (short, online/offline, and performance-based) that separately measures the multiple processes that could be the building blocks of mentalizing. Third, the preliminary empirical data supporting that we identified distinct socio-cognitive profiles within the same clinical populations.