The differential diagnosis between schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) remains an important clinical question, because they have overlap in clinical diagnosis. This study explored the differences between ASD (n = 44) and SSD patients (n = 59), compared to typically developing peers (n = 63), in completing an advanced Theory of Mind (ToM) task. The outcome found several differences between groups. The SSD patients showed greater difficulty in understanding social scenarios, while ASD individuals understood the stories, but did not correctly identify the protagonist’s intention. The interesting aspect of the results is that some ToM stories are more informative about the mentalistic reasoning of the two clinical groups, namely, the stories that investigate pretend, persuasion, double bluff and ironic joke constructs.

Background Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by an impairment in social cognition (SC). SC is a cognitive construct that refers to the capacity to process information about social situations. It is a complex network that includes distinct components. Exploring how SC components work together leads to a better understanding of how their interactions promote adequate social functioning. Our main goal was to use a novel statistical method, graph theory, to analyze SC relationships in ASD and Typically Developing (TD) individuals. Methods We applied graph theory to SC measures to verify how the SC components interact and to establish which of them are important within the interacting SC network for TD and ASD groups. Results The results showed that, in the TD group, the SC nodes are connected; their network showed increased betweenness among nodes, especially for the Theory of Mind. By contrast, in the SC network in the ASD group the nodes are highly disconnected, and the efficient connection among the components is absent. Conclusion ASD adults do not show SC competencies and functional communication among these skills. Under this regard, specific components are crucial, suggesting they could represent critical domains for ASD SC.

Early diagnosis is crucial for Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and is achieved through a screening of developmental indicators to recognise children who are at risk of autism. One of the most widely used instruments in clinical practice for assessing child development is the Griffiths Mental Development Scale (GMDS). We sought (a) to assess longitudinally whether children diagnosed with ASD, with a mean age of 33.50 months (SD 7.69 months), show a developmental delay of abilities measured by the GMDS over time and (b) to analyse which skills of the GMDS could be associate to the symptomatologic severity of ASD. Our results showed lower scores of General Quotient and all sub-quotients of GMDS from first (T0) to second assessment (T1), except for the Performance sub-quotient. Three sub-quotients (Personal-Social, Hearing and Language and Practical Reasoning) also associate symptom severity at the time when the diagnosis of ASD is made.

Aesthetic perception plays a significant role in social behavior. The ability to recognize and perceive beauty is important for social situations in that it can create different expectations about human behavior. It has been hypothesized that the aesthetic experience is characterized by emotional and hedonic responses to the stimuli. People with schizophrenia are characterized by the presence of negative symptoms, such as anhedonia, which affect daily social functioning. We explored the idea that the presence of anhedonia and an impairment in the subjective experience of pleasure in people with schizophrenia could play a key role, affecting their ability to experience and perceive aesthetic pleasure and, consequently, negatively affecting their social behavior. We evaluated the ability to perceive aesthetics aesthetic perception ability in people with schizophrenia (schizophrenia group, SG) compared to a control group (CG), using the golden beauty behavioral task, which requires subjects to judge the proportions and aesthetics of masterpieces of classical art. Gazing behavior was also recorded while performing the task using eye-tracker methodology. Our results showed that the SG did not present different behaviors between stimuli types, while the CG evaluated canonical sculptures as more pleasant and fixed them longer. The SG’s subjective aesthetic experience of canonical stimuli seems to be affected by their awareness of cognitive issues, evaluated by the Subjective Scale to Investigate Cognition in Schizophrenia (SSTICS), and thus these dimensions could be important aspects of their altered aesthetic experience.