Preserved Spontaneous Mentalizing amid Reduced Intersubject Variability in Autism during a Movie Narrative.

Background: While individuals with autism often face challenges in everyday social interactions, they may demonstrate proficiency in structured Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks that assess their ability to infer others' mental states. Using functional MRI and pupillometry, we investigated whether these discrepancies stem from diminished spontaneous mentalizing or broader difficulties in unstructured contexts.

Methods: Fifty-two adults diagnosed with autism and 52 neurotypical controls viewed 'Partly Cloudy', a nonverbal animated film with a dynamic social narrative known to engage the ToM brain network during specific scenes.

Predicting Recidivism Among Internet Child Sex Sting Offenders Using Psychological Language Analysis.

In this study, we examined the extent to which computerized linguistic analysis of natural language data from chat transcripts of Internet child sex stings predicted recidivism among 334 convicted offenders. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program, we found that reoffenders (including simultaneous and previous offenders) differed significantly from nonreoffenders in measures of clout (a composite measure of social dominance) and percentage of words used in the following linguistic categories: cognitive processes, personal pronoun use, insight, time, and ingestion. In contrast, total word count and percentage of sexual words, two categories that might be assumed to be predictive of recidivism, were not significantly different between these two groups.