[Assessment of sociocognitive functions in neurological patients Presentation of a French adaptation of two tools and implementation in frontal dementia]

Geriatr Psychol Neuropsychiatr Vieil. 2011 Mar;9(1):117-28. doi: 10.1684/pnv.2010.0252.
[Article in French]

Abstract

This paper presents a French battery designed to assess emotional and sociocognitive abilities in neurological patients in clinical practice. The first part of this battery includes subtests assessing emotions: a recognition task of primary facial emotions, a discrimination task of facial emotions, a task of expressive intensity judgment, a task of gender identification, a recognition task of musical emotions. The second part intends to assess some sociocognitive abilities, that is mainly theory of mind (attribution tasks of mental states to others: false believe tasks of first and second order, faux-pas task) and social norms (moral/conventional distinction task, social situations task) but also abstract language and humour. We present a general description of the battery with special attention to specific methodological constraints for the assessment of neurological patients. After a brief introduction to moral and conventional judgments (definition and current theoretical basis), the French version of the social norm task from RJR Blair (Blair and Cipolotti, 2000) is developed. The relevance of these tasks in frontal variant of frontotemporal dementia (fvFTD is illustrated by the report of the results of a study conducted in 18 patients by the Cambridge group and by the personal study of a patient with early stage of vfFTD. The relevance of the diagnostic of sociocognitive impairment in neurological patients is discussed.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study
  • Validation Study

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Cross-Cultural Comparison*
  • Emotions*
  • Facial Expression*
  • Frontotemporal Dementia / diagnosis*
  • Frontotemporal Dementia / psychology
  • Gender Identity
  • Humans
  • Judgment
  • Mental Status Schedule / statistics & numerical data
  • Music*
  • Neuropsychological Tests / statistics & numerical data*
  • Pattern Recognition, Visual*
  • Projective Techniques / statistics & numerical data
  • Psychometrics / statistics & numerical data
  • Social Conformity
  • Social Values
  • Speech Perception*
  • Theory of Mind
  • Translating