Mentalizing skills drive teen storytelling ability more than autism diagnosis

A new study published in Autism Research has found that the ability to understand what others are thinking and feeling, known as mentalizing, is strongly linked to how well teenagers can tell stories. This skill appears to be more influential in storytelling than whether or not a young person has autism. The study suggests that supporting the development of mentalizing abilities could be beneficial for improving communication skills in all adolescents, regardless of their background.

Storytelling is a fundamental part of human interaction. It’s how we share experiences, connect with others, and even learn in school. For teenagers, being able to tell a good story is important for making friends, participating in class, and navigating daily life. Previous studies have indicated that some young people with autism may find it more difficult to create well-structured and clear stories compared to their peers without autism. However, research findings have been inconsistent, and scientists are still working to understand the reasons behind these differences.

“Producing spoken narrative accounts is an essential aspect of communication for adolescents in everyday social contexts, such as in the classroom, with friends, or at home,” said study author Anna Harvey of City St George’s, University of London. “Autistic young people tend to find these kinds of verbal interactions particularly challenging. We were therefore interested in exploring some of the underlying cognitive skills that may support the production of well-structured and coherent narratives in autistic versus non-autistic adolescents.”

To explore this further, the research team investigated cognitive skills that might influence storytelling ability in teenagers, focusing on two areas often discussed in relation to autism: mentalizing and executive function. Mentalizing is the ability to understand that other people have their own thoughts, feelings, and intentions and to infer what those mental states might be. Executive function refers to a set of mental processes that help people plan, organize, and manage thoughts and actions, including remembering information, switching between tasks, and controlling impulses.

While both mentalizing and executive function have been studied in connection to autism, their relationship to storytelling skills—especially spoken narratives—remains unclear. This study aimed to clarify those connections by examining both autistic and non-autistic adolescents.

To conduct their research, the scientists recruited 44 teenagers with autism and 54 teenagers without autism, all between the ages of 11 and 15. The two groups were carefully matched in age, gender, general cognitive abilities, and language skills. This matching ensured that any differences in storytelling were not simply due to these basic factors. All participants completed a single session conducted online via video conferencing. While these assessments are typically done in person, research suggests that online versions can yield reliable results.

The teenagers participated in several tasks. First, to assess storytelling abilities, they watched two short video clips. One was an animated video with no dialogue, depicting a misunderstanding between two people. The other was a live-action clip featuring real actors and dialogue, showing a student arriving late to class and getting into trouble. After watching each video, the teenagers were asked to describe what happened in their own words.

These spoken stories were recorded and later analyzed in two ways. The first analysis examined the overall structure of the story, sometimes referred to as “story grammar.” This involved checking whether the stories included key elements such as the setting, the problem, the actions taken, and the outcome. The second analysis focused on how coherent the story was, evaluating whether it was easy to follow, made logical sense, and provided enough context for a listener to understand.

In addition to the storytelling tasks, the teenagers completed several tests designed to measure their mentalizing and executive function skills. Mentalizing ability was assessed using two tasks. In one, participants read short stories about social situations and answered questions that required understanding the characters’ thoughts and feelings. The other task used silent film clips, with participants responding to questions that tested their ability to infer the characters’ mental states.

Executive function was measured through four different tasks, each targeting a specific cognitive skill. These included tests of working memory (the ability to hold and manipulate information), inhibition (the ability to resist impulsive responses), shifting (the ability to switch between different tasks or ways of thinking), and generativity (the ability to rapidly generate ideas or words).

The study’s findings revealed a strong link between mentalizing skills and storytelling ability. Teenagers who performed better on the mentalizing tasks produced stories that were both well-structured and coherent, regardless of whether they had autism. In fact, mentalizing ability was a stronger predictor of storytelling performance than an autism diagnosis.

Although the researchers found that autism diagnosis predicted overall story structure—autistic teenagers tended to have slightly lower structure scores—it did not predict how coherent the stories were.

“Mentalizing—the ability to infer what others may be thinking or feeling—appears to be strongly linked to narrative ability. Adolescents with better mentalizing skills produced more coherent and structured narrative accounts than those with poorer mentalizing skills, regardless of whether they were autistic or not,” Harvey told PsyPost.

Interestingly, the executive function tests did not show a significant relationship with storytelling skills. This suggests that, at least in this group of teenagers, mentalizing is more important for spoken storytelling than the specific aspects of executive function that were measured.

“We were surprised not to find a significant relationship between executive functions and narrative ability in this sample, as some previous research would suggest,” Harvey said. “There are various possible explanations for this. For example, it could be that the controlled executive function tasks we used did not accurately reflect how participants use their executive skills in real-life situations.”

The study accounted for factors such as age, cognitive abilities, and language skills to isolate the specific effects of mentalizing, executive function, and diagnosis. However, like all research, it had some limitations. The autistic participants in this study generally had good cognitive and language skills and required less support, meaning the findings might not apply to all autistic individuals—particularly those with intellectual disabilities or more significant communication challenges.

Additionally, while the study included both boys and girls, fewer autistic girls were in the sample, which could limit how well the findings apply to autistic girls, who sometimes present differently than autistic boys. The researchers also noted that while the tool used to measure story coherence was new and promising, it could be refined further to improve reliability.

Looking ahead, the researchers suggest that future studies could explore what factors contribute to differences in mentalizing skills among teenagers and whether specific interventions designed to improve mentalizing could also enhance storytelling abilities. Given the strong link between mentalizing and narrative skills, such interventions could benefit a wide range of young people—not just those with autism—who struggle with communication and social interaction.

“Our findings raise the question of whether developing adolescents’ mentalizing skills could lead to improvements in their spoken narrative ability,” Harvey said. “We feel that this would be an interesting avenue for future research.”

“This study adds to the growing body of research highlighting the limitations of diagnostic labels in characterizing areas of strength and challenge across individuals. It may be more useful to identify important dimensions that affect task performance—such as mentalizing ability—rather than focusing solely on specific diagnoses.”

The study, “Narrative abilities of autistic and non-autistic adolescents: The role of mentalising and executive function,” was authored by Anna Harvey, Helen Spicer-Cain, Nicola Botting, and Lucy Henry.