Spanish validation of the “Reading the Mind in the Voice” task: A study of complex emotion recognition in adults with autism spectrum conditions

Abstract

Background: Social cognition includes a range of cognitive processes that help individuals understand how others think and feel. Recent proposals outline the relevance of this cognitive domain in a broad set of clinical pictures, as well as its diagnostic and prognostic value. In this study, we present the Spanish validation of the Reading the Mind in the Voice (RMV-SV) task, (Rutherford et al., 2002), an instrument for the recognition of mental states and complex emotions through prosody. Method: A group of adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD, n = 45) were compared to a control group from the general population (n = 51) in several emotion-recognition tasks. Results: The ASD group performed worse than controls overall on complex emotion and mental state recognition from voices (ŋ2 =.322; p <.01), statistically significant differences were found on 18/33 specific emotions. A positive correlation was found between verbal and nonverbal IQ and emotion recognition task scores. Using RMV-SV scores, 87.5% of the participants were correctly allocated to their original condition group. Conclusions: The results confirmed the alteration of the recognition of mental states and complex emotions by prosody among adults diagnosed with ASD. The RMV-SV showed suitable validity and reliability indexes, so the adapted task could facilitate the evaluation of complex emotion recognition through prosody in Spanish