The comprehension of social situations in a small group of patients with frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease
Journal Title: Acta Neuropsychologica - Year 2011, Vol 9, Issue 2
Abstract
‘Social understanding’ refers to the complex ability to interpret social situations properly in everyday life. It has recently been proposed that the severe social and behavioural problems that often characterize frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may be at least partially the result of an impairment in social understanding. The present study was thus designed to investigate the possible presence of defective social understanding in a small group encompassing both FTD and AD patients. Small groups of dementia patients (n = 12) and matched healthy controls (n = 15) underwent standard clinical, neurological and neuropsychological assessments. Then, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test was administered to all the participants, along with a validated story completion task encompassing both social and non-social stereotyped situations. The dementia patients’ performance on both tasks was worse than healthy controls performance. Interestingly, both the non-social and the social parts of the story completion task were significantly impaired, but with the social part being more com-promised. These preliminary findings suggest the presence of significant difficulties in attributing mental states to others appropriately and interpreting properly stories that explicitly refer to social situations. Our results underline the need for further research to gain a deeper understanding of the possible link between patients’ behavioural problems and their social understanding impairment.
Authors and Affiliations
Marco Cavallo, Ivan Enrici, Mauro Adenzato
Keywords
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