Social Cognition in Autism and Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: The Same but Different?
The MASC short film test best spots social-cognition gaps in adults with autism or schizophrenia and stays fair across IQ and age.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team gave four social-cognition tests to three groups of adults: autism, schizophrenia spectrum, and neurotypical controls.
They wanted to know which test best tells the groups apart and whether IQ or age muddles the scores.
What they found
All clinical adults scored lower than controls on every test.
Among the four tools, the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC) gave the clearest split.
MASC scores stayed clean even when IQ or age differed.
How this fits with other research
Tereza-Mas et al. (2019) ran a near-copy study and saw the same pattern: autism plus schizophrenia groups both trail controls.
Grzadzinski et al. (2016) tested autistic children with the SAT-MC and also found real-life social skills linked to test scores, backing the idea that these films measure something useful outside the lab.
van Timmeren et al. (2016) looks like a clash: they say autism problems come from emotion, not social complexity. Bellon-Harn et al. (2020) add schizophrenia adults and show the MASC (which mixes emotion and complex social scenes) still wins. The difference is the lens: one paper isolates face emotion; the other tests broader social scenes.
Why it matters
When you need a quick, fair social-cognition snapshot for an adult with autism or schizophrenia, grab the MASC. It separates clinical from typical adults without being fooled by IQ or age, and it takes only 15 minutes. Swap it in for longer batteries during reassessments or when treatment progress feels stuck.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add the MASC to your next adult assessment battery and compare the score to last quarter’s social-skills checklist.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Social cognition impairment is a core shared phenotype in both schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This study compares social cognition performance through four different instruments in a sample of 147 individuals with ASD or SSD and in healthy controls. We found that both clinical groups perform similarly to each other and worse than healthy controls in all social cognition tasks. Only performance on the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC) test was independent of age and intelligence. Proportionately, individuals in the control group made significantly more overmentalization errors than both patients group did and made fewer undermentalization errors than patients with SSD did. AUC analyses showed that the MASC was the instrument that best discriminated between the clinical and control groups. Multivariate analysis showed negative symptom severity as a potential mediator of the association between social cognition deficit and poor global functioning.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2020 · doi:10.1007/s10803-020-04408-4