Neuroanatomical markers of social cognition in neglected adolescents.

Growing up in neglectful households can impact multiple aspects of social cognition. However, research on neglect's effects on social cognition processes and their neuroanatomical correlates during adolescence is scarce. Here, we aimed to comprehensively assess social cognition processes (recognition of basic and contextual emotions, theory of mind, the experience of envy and Schadenfreude and empathy for pain) and their structural brain correlates in adolescents with legal neglect records within family-based care. First, we compared neglected adolescents (n = 27) with control participants (n = 25) on context-sensitive social cognition tasks while controlling for physical and emotional abuse and executive and intellectual functioning. Additionally, we explored the grey matter correlates of these domains through voxel-based morphometry. Compared to controls, neglected adolescents exhibited lower performance in contextual emotional recognition and theory of mind, higher levels of envy and Schadenfreude and diminished empathy. Physical and emotional abuse and executive or intellectual functioning did not explain these effects. Moreover, social cognition scores correlated with brain volumes in regions subserving social cognition and emotional processing. Our results underscore the potential impact of neglect on different aspects of social cognition during adolescence, emphasizing the necessity for preventive and intervention strategies to address these deficits in this population.

Moral Emotions and Their Brain Structural Correlates Across Neurodegenerative Disorders.

BACKGROUND: Although social cognition is compromised in patients with neurodegenerative disorders such as behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), research on moral emotions and their neural correlates in these populations is scarce. No previous study has explored the utility of moral emotions, compared to and in combination with classical general cognitive state tools, to discriminate bvFTD from AD patients. OBJECTIVE: To examine self-conscious (guilt and embarrassment) and other-oriented (pity and indignation) moral emotions, their subjective experience, and their structural brain underpinnings in bvFTD (n = 31) and AD (n = 30) patients, compared to healthy controls (n = 37). We also explored the potential utility of moral emotions measures to discriminate bvFTD from AD. METHODS: We used a modified version of the Moral Sentiment Task measuring the participants' accuracy scores and their emotional subjective experiences. RESULTS: bvFTD patients exhibited greater impairments in self-conscious and other-oriented moral emotions as compared with AD patients and healthy controls. Moral emotions combined with general cognitive state tools emerged as useful measures to discriminate bvFTD from AD patients. In bvFTD patients, lower moral emotions scores were associated with lower gray matter volumes in caudate nucleus and inferior and middle temporal gyri. In AD, these scores were associated with lower gray matter volumes in superior and middle frontal gyri, middle temporal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule and supramarginal gyrus. CONCLUSION: These findings contribute to a better understanding of moral emotion deficits across neurodegenerative disorders, highlighting the potential benefits of integrating this domain into the clinical assessment.

Does culture shape our understanding of others' thoughts and emotions? An investigation across 12 countries.

Measures of social cognition have now become central in neuropsychology, being essential for early and differential diagnoses, follow-up, and rehabilitation in a wide range of conditions. With the scientific world becoming increasingly interconnected, international neuropsychological and medical collaborations are burgeoning to tackle the global challenges that are mental health conditions. These initiatives commonly merge data across a diversity of populations and countries, while ignoring their specificity. OBJECTIVE: In this context, we aimed to estimate the influence of participants' nationality on social cognition evaluation. This issue is of particular importance as most cognitive tasks are developed in highly specific contexts, not representative of that encountered by the world's population. METHOD: Through a large international study across 18 sites, neuropsychologists assessed core aspects of social cognition in 587 participants from 12 countries using traditional and widely used tasks. RESULTS: Age, gender, and education were found to impact measures of mentalizing and emotion recognition. After controlling for these factors, differences between countries accounted for more than 20% of the variance on both measures. Importantly, it was possible to isolate participants' nationality from potential translation issues, which classically constitute a major limitation. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, these findings highlight the need for important methodological shifts to better represent social cognition in both fundamental research and clinical practice, especially within emerging international networks and consortia. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic Memory and Lexical Availability in Parkinson's Disease: A Statistical Learning Study.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes a progressive impairment in motor and cognitive functions. Although semantic fluency deficits have been described in PD, more specific semantic memory (SM) and lexical availability (LA) domains have not been previously addressed. Here, we aimed to characterize the cognitive performance of PD patients in a set of SM and LA measures and determine the smallest set of neuropsychological (lexical, semantic, or executive) variables that most accurately classify groups. Thirty early-stage non-demented PD patients (age 35-75, 10 females) and thirty healthy controls (age 36-76, 12 females) were assessed via general cognitive, SM [three subtests of the CaGi battery including living (i.e., elephant) and non-living things (i.e., fork)], and LA (eliciting words from 10 semantic categories related to everyday life) measures. Results showed that PD patients performed lower than controls in two SM global scores (picture naming and naming in response to an oral description). This impairment was particularly pronounced in the non-living things subscale. Also, the number of words in the LA measure was inferior in PD patients than controls, in both larger and smaller semantic fields, showing a more inadequate recall strategy. Notably, the classification algorithms indicated that the SM task had high classification accuracy. In particular, the denomination of non-living things had a classification accuracy of ∼80%. These results suggest that frontostriatal deterioration in PD leads to search strategy deficits in SF and the potential disruption in semantic categorization. These findings are consistent with the embodied view of cognition.