Theory Of Mind, Autism And Social Relationships.

1946 Words8 Pages
Word Count: 1380 Title: Theory of Mind is vital to the development of social skills. Discuss? Having the ability to understand another person’s mind is vital in developing and maintaining successful social relationships. This essay will discuss implications for the development of Theory of mind (TOM) and examine how individuals with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) are said to have difficulties developing a TOM and what effect this has on their social skills. First this essay will briefly define TOM and ASC. Following on, the essay will describe one of the main TOM related tests and present studies that show how typically developing and autistic individuals perform on these tests. The second part of the essay will discuss some limitations of TOM methods for understanding social competence and put forward an additional method for measuring abilities in the social world. Baron-Cohen (2001) describes TOM as the ability to infer the full range of mental states e.g. beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions etc. The ability to impute mental states is very important because social relationships can be restricted if an individual assumes that everyone has the same beliefs that he or she has (Gillibrand et al., 2011). Support for TOM abilities has been supplied by various tasks. Dennett (1978) put forward that the only way to measure the ability to impute mental states is to test an individual’s understanding of false beliefs. Studies carried out suggest that typically developing children do not develop a TOM until they are around 4 years of age because they fail on false belief tasks (Wimmer and Perner, 1983; Baron-Cohen et al,1985 as cited in Gillibrand et al., 2011). It is argued however that development of a TOM is hindered with children diagnosed with autism (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) is estimated to occur in
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