Editorial: Exploring links between social communication and mental health

Social communication (SC) implies the selection of appropriate non-verbal and verbal messages and their appropriate interpretation within a social context. SC serves a rich variety of communicative functions of varying degrees of complexity (such as attracting somebody’s attention, commenting, asking for information, sharing information or emotions and humor, arguing or negotiating). Essentially, SC includes the mastering of reciprocity and following the rules of human conversation (including turn-taking skills, topic adherence or communicative repair strategies). SC difficulties are highly heterogeneous and encompass clinical as well as non-clinical groups. Impairments of SC can be associated with mental, behavioral and neurodevelopmental disorders, and are a core symptom of autism spectrum disorders and the recently introduced ICD-11 category of “developmental language disorder with impairment of mainly pragmatic language.” In addition, SC difficulties can be associated with non-clinical populations such as children of low socio-economic background or with other experiences of deprivation. Finally, in case of insignificant impact on everyday functioning, SC difficulties can be regarded as an expression of human neurodiversity. This Research Topic aimed to increase our understanding of SC skills in childhood and youth and the correlations with current or subsequent mental health problems. The collection of articles includes a systematic review by our working group (Dall et al.) and a number of empirical articles on the association between SC skills and child mental health (Fellinger et al.; Rimehaug and Kårstad) and the wellbeing of the family environment (Laister et al.). The relationships between early childhood experiences and child SC development are explored by a conceptual paper by Jethava et al. and a population-based empirical study by Law et al.. Finally, Weber et al. offer an instrument to measure SC skills in an adult population with special needs.