This meta-analysis tested whether autistic people show a marked, isolated difficulty with mentalising when assessed using the Frith -Happé Animations, an advanced test of mentalising (or ‘theory of mind’). Effect sizes were aggregated in multivariate meta-analysis from 33 papers reporting data for over 3000 autistic and non-autistic people. Relative to non-autistic individuals, autistic people underperformed, with a small effect size on the non-mentalising control conditions and a medium effect size on the mentalising condition. This indicates that studies have reliably found mentalising to be an area of challenge for autistic people, although the group differences were not large. It remains to be seen how important mentalising difficulties are in accounting for the social difficulties diagnostic of autism. As autistic people underperformed on the control conditions as well as the mentalising condition, it is likely that group differences on the test are partly due to domain-general information processing differences. Finally, there was evidence of publication bias, suggesting that true effects on the Frith -Happé Animations may be somewhat smaller than reported in the literature.

Lay abstract

Autistic people are thought to have difficulty with mentalising (our drive to track and understand the minds of other people). Mentalising is often measured by the Frith -Happé Animations task, where individuals need to interpret the interactions of abstract shapes. This review article collated results from over 3000 people to assess how autistic people performed on the task. Analysis showed that autistic people tended to underperform compared to non-autistic people on the task, although the scale of the difference was moderate rather than large. Also, autistic people showed some difficulty with the non-mentalising as well as mentalising aspects of the task. These results raise questions about the scale and specificity of mentalising difficulties in autism. It also remains unclear how well mentalising difficulties account for the social challenges diagnostic of autism.

中文翻译：

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动画三角形是否揭示了自闭症患者在读心术方面存在的明显困难？

这项荟萃分析测试了自闭症患者在使用Frith-Happé动画（一种高级心理化测试（或“心理理论”）进行评估时）是否表现出明显的、孤立的心理化困难。效应大小通过 33 篇论文的多变量荟萃分析进行汇总，报告了超过 3000 名自闭症和非自闭症患者的数据。相对于非自闭症个体，自闭症患者表现不佳，对非心智化控制条件的影响较小，对心智化控制条件的影响大小中等。这表明研究可靠地发现心理化对自闭症患者来说是一个挑战领域，尽管群体差异并不大。心理化困难在解释自闭症的社会困难诊断中有多重要还有待观察。由于自闭症患者在控制条件和心智化条件下表现不佳，因此测试中的群体差异可能部分归因于一般领域信息处理差异。最后，有证据表明存在出版偏见，这表明对弗里斯-哈佩动画的真正影响可能比文献中报道的要小一些。

 外行摘要

自闭症患者被认为难以心智化（我们追踪和理解他人思想的动力）。心理化通常通过 Frith-Happé 动画任务来衡量，其中个人需要解释抽象形状的相互作用。这篇评论文章整理了 3000 多人的结果，以评估自闭症患者在这项任务中的表现。分析表明，与非自闭症患者相比，自闭症患者在这项任务上往往表现不佳，尽管差异幅度不大，但并不大。此外，自闭症患者在任务的非心理化和心理化方面都表现出一些困难。这些结果提出了关于自闭症心理困难的规模和特异性的问题。目前还不清楚心智化困难在多大程度上解释了自闭症诊断的社会挑战。