The Japanese Adaptation of the Reading the Mind in Films Test: Differentiating Autism Spectrum Disorder From Depression Using an Ecologically Valid Social Cognitive Task.

Cognitive tests that reflect the complexity of real-world social interactions are essential for autism spectrum disorder (ASD)-related clinical assessment and research. This study developed and adapted a Japanese version of the Reading the Mind in Films (RMF) test, which assesses mind-reading ability through dynamic, multisensory, and context-rich stimuli. Participants included 23 autistic adults, 39 typically developing adults, and 40 adults with depression as a clinical control. RMF scores in the autistic group were significantly lower than in both the typically developing and depression groups. Hierarchical logistic regression analyses showed that RMF performance provided incremental predictive value beyond Reading the Mind in the Eyes test performance in differentiating autistic individuals from typically developing participants and from participants with depression. Receiver operating characteristic analyses further indicated moderate discriminative accuracy of the RMF for differentiating autistic from non-autistic individuals. In contrast, the depression group performed comparably to the typically developing group on the RMF, suggesting that the RMF captures ASD-specific social cognitive difficulties rather than social dysfunction. These findings provide preliminary support for both the construct validity and the potential discriminative utility of the Japanese RMF. This tool has potential applications in future transdiagnostic and cross-cultural studies.