Social Understanding in the Community: Establishing Links to Previous Family Issues as well as an Understanding of Mental States on Disadvantaged Adolescents

Abstract

Objective The purpose of the present study was to assess links to previous familial issues as well as an understanding of mental states on disadvantaged adolescents while controlling for age, fluid intelligence, and verbal ability. The other objective was to compare atypical adolescents to typical counterparts about general reasoning and social understanding. Method Participants included 50 individuals who had experienced previous maltreatment (physical abuse/ neglect) aged 9 to 26 years-old and 90 university students (typical) aged 18 - 33 years-old. Participants completed fluid intelligence task (Raven Progress Matrices), vocabulary task (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test), Emotion Faces Task, Eye task, Point Light Tasks (emotion and action), and Mr Bean Task. Result Results of multivariate analysis of covariance of both groups indicated that the atypical group was not generally worse than the typical group on the tasks tapping social understanding; they were better on two tasks and worse on one task. The partial correlation analyses performed only on the atypical group indicated that the correlations were inconsistent in indicating that emotional/physical abuse was associated with both correct and incorrect responding to Mr Bean mental state task. Conclusions The findings suggest the complexity of the relation between social understanding and wellbeing variables, in that the maltreated youth would do well on one task and poorly on another. These findings suggest the unpredictability in maltreated individuals’ reading of others’ mental states and the possibility that social understanding improves in abused youth over time.