Social cognition and pragmatic abilities in adolescence

Abstract

Introduction. The present investigation is an exploratory study that describes Social Cognition abilities and pragmatic skills in adolescents. The scope of both of these areas has drawn a very diffuse line between them, since they seem to evaluate very similar components. Both areas are focused on the understanding of others, their mental states, and their intentions within a situation or a conversation. Moreover, both need a context, a background, and an ability to comprehend all of this together. Objective. To establish the relation between Social Cognition tasks and pragmatic tasks performance in adolescents from 15 to 18 years old in Santiago, Chile. Methodology. 15 participants were evaluated between 15 and 18 years old. One test of Theory of Mind and emotional assessment was carried out, along with three tests related to pragmatics, which specifically measured irony, indirect speech acts, and narrative discourse tasks. Moreover, an observational protocol was used to complement the pragmatic assessment. Results. In terms of descriptive results, woman obtained better results than men in most of the test of both areas, nevertheless, there was no relation between age and level with the tests held. Furthermore, in the case of correlations, only emotional assessment performance was correlated to indirect speech acts recognition and with the attention part of the irony test. Conclusion. The importance of adolescent’s profile seems to be clear. The results obtained showed a relation in the areas of study, however, most of them need further evaluation on typical adolescents.