Psychometric validation of social cognition measures in U.S. Hispanic individuals with schizophrenia.

Comparative study of emotion recognition and theory of mind between major depressive disorder and schizophrenia

Brief battery of the Social Cognition Psychometric Evaluation study (BB-SCOPE): Development and validation in schizophrenia spectrum disorders

Background: Social cognition is increasingly seen as a viable treatment target due to its strong influence on functional outcomes. However, in order to enhance the validity of basic research on social cognition and to improve social cognitive interventions, it is necessary that psychometrically sound measures be used. The current work presents new data from the NIMH-funded Social Cognition Psychometric Evaluation (SCOPE) study, which aims to identify and improve the best existing measures of social cognition so they can be suitably applied in large-scale treatment studies. Initial phases of this project evaluated the psychometric properties of 8 of the most widely used measures and found that the Bell Lysaker Emotion Recognition Task (BLERT) and Hinting Task could be recommended for use in clinical trials but that the Penn Emotion Recognition Task (ER-40), Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (Eyes), and The Awareness of Social Inferences Test (TASIT) would benefit from modification. Here, we evaluated the reliability and validity of the modified tasks as well as 2 novel tasks. Methods: Two hundred eighteen individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 154 healthy controls completed a 4-week test-retest study designed to evaluate the psychometric properties of 7 measures of social cognition. Tasks include the BLERT, ER-40, Eyes task, TASIT, Hinting Task, the Mini Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (MiniPONS), and the Social Attribution Task – Multiple Choice (SAT-MC). Results: Preliminary data demonstrate that all tasks except the SAT-MC showed adequate test-retest reliability. BLERT, Hinting, SAT and TASIT all showed small, but significant, practice effects, and the SAT-MC showed the greatest degree of practice effects with 10% of the patient sample scoring at or below chance levels. All tasks were significantly correlated with social competence and functional capacity, with BLERT, ER40, Hinting, and TASIT showing the most robust relationships (all r > .40). Likewise, for all tasks, healthy controls performed significantly better than individuals with schizophrenia. The majority of tasks were completed in under 10 minutes, with the exception of TASIT which took 18 minutes on average. Participants reported favorable impressions of all tasks except the MiniPONS. Conclusion: These preliminary psychometric data suggest that the BLERT and Hinting tasks continue to be strong candidates for use in clinical trials. The ER40 also appears to be particularly promising. While the 2 social perception measures (SAT-MC and MiniPONS) have positive features, both show areas of weakness that suggest they may be of more limited use in clinical trials. These findings also highlight the significant need for continued development of psychometrically sound social perception measures.

BackgroundSocial cognition is crucial to optimal social functioning outcomes in older adults, with implications for overall health and wellbeing. Moreover, poor social cognition is a diagnostic criterion for neurocognitive disorders (NCDs). Prior work has studied the social cognitive subdomains (theory of mind (ToM), affective empathy, emotion recognition, and social behaviour) and found mild cognitive impairment and dementia to be associated with poorer performance in specific tasks and informant‐reported changes respectively. These patterns in NCDs need to be distinguished from normal age‐related changes, and more information is needed to ascertain what factors predict social cognitive decline in healthy ageing.Method132 non‐demented participants [mean MMSE 29.23 (SD 0.99)] aged 60 to 100 underwent comprehensive social cognitive assessments that varied based on modality of information (Figure 1), alongside neurocognitive assessments and affective questionnaires. Participants were divided based on decades to study age‐related changes. Linear regression models identified significant predictors of social cognition performance amongst demographic, neuropsychological assessment scores, affective scores, and social networks.ResultAge was associated with poorer performance in ToM tasks, specifically the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) Cognitive subscale, and The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) part 3, and emotion recognition tasks, specifically the FACES task and TASIT 1, for expressions of anger, disgust, and sadness (Table 1). In regression models (Table 2), age was a significant predictor of RMET and FACES performance. In MET cognitive and both TASITs, neuropsychological tasks, mainly executive function, were predictive. Poorer executive function predicted performance for identifying unspoken emotions (“Feel” subscore) in TASIT 3. MET Emotional and the self‐rated Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) Empathic Concern subscale was associated with less anxiety and more positive emotions at assessment.ConclusionIn ToM and emotion recognition, unimodal task performance was associated with age and some cognitive factors, and multimodal task performance was largely associated with executive function. Performance in affective empathy tasks was linked to affective measures. Poor performance in multimodal tasks likely reflects executive dysfunction in consolidating multiple streams of social information, while some declining performance in unimodal tasks may be normative to ageing.

Evaluation of social cognitive measures in an Asian schizophrenia sample

The present paper addresses the psychometric quality of the shortened Dutch version of The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT), a social cognition task comprising dynamic social interactions. Because the original TASIT required a rather long administration time, two shortened parallel forms were developed. Results showed that TASIT–short was feasible and that the two alternate forms were reasonably comparable in a group of neurologically healthy individuals (N = 98). Also, the results confirmed the ecological validity of TASIT–short in this healthy group. The test appeared sensitive to brain injury as it differentiated between the healthy subjects and a group of patients with acquired brain injury (N = 16). On the basis of the present study we conclude that TASIT–short has added value to the assessment of social cognition in patients with acquired brain injury.

The evaluation study for social cognition measures in Japan: Psychometric properties, relationships with social function, and recommendations

Primary objective: Social cognition underlies social skills and can be disrupted in numerous developmental and acquired brain disorders during childhood and adolescence. Despite this, there are few tools to assess social cognition clinically in this age group. This study examined adolescent performance on The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT), a valid measure of social cognition in adults.Design: Cross-sectional design examining performance on Parts 1, 2 and 3 of TASIT (and alternate forms) in Australian girls and boys with varying levels of English familiarity.Methods: 665 schoolchildren from private and government schools were administered TASIT subtests. Of these, 464 students aged 13–15 were selected to provide normative data. Scores from a further 97 provided information about the effects of lack of English familiarity.Results: The two Forms of TASIT were statistically equivalent for two of the three parts. Adolescents performed lower than adults, although the differences were not large. Some incremental effects were seen for chronological age. Gender effects were apparent on all subtests. Lack of English familiarity (i.e., English not spoken at home) reduced scores a further 6–13% relative to high English proficiency.Conclusions: TASIT appears to be suitable for adolescents. Norms are best aggregated across ages in adolescence and stratified according to gender.

The Social Attribution Task - Multiple Choice (SAT-MC): Psychometric comparison with social cognitive measures for schizophrenia research

Event Abstract Back to Event Diffusion tensor imaging in traumatic brain injury to examine pathological links with social Katie I. Dalton1*, Jacqueline A. Rushby1, Nicklas Parks1, Samantha K. Allen1 and Skye McDonald1 1 University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Australia Background Severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) is highly heterogeneous across sufferers. Despite this, TBI patients commonly develop diffuse axonal injury as a result from the neuronal degeneration after injury, which can extend deep into the brain to the corpus callosum (CC). Additionally, TBI patients suffer chronic social and emotional deficits resulting from injury. The present study examined the relationship between directional diffusivity of the white matter tracts within regions of the CC, measured by Fractional anisotropy (FA), and social cognition, measured by The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT), in TBI. Method Diffusion MRI scans were obtained from 17 participants with moderate to severe TBI and 17 matched controls. Participants were administered the TASIT and scores were calculated for emotion evaluation and social inference. Deterministic DTI was performed to obtain FA values from three regions of the CC: genu, body and splenium. TASIT scores and FA values were compared between groups and cc regions. FA values were correlated with TASIT scores. Results TBI participants scored significantly lower in both emotion evaluation and social inference compared to controls. TBI participants had significantly lower FA values overall, however within both groups, FA values were highest in the splenium and lowest in the genu. Higher scores on the TASIT were related to higher FA values across all regions of the CC except the genu. Conclusions Overall, TBI participants had lower directional diffusivity of white matter within the CC, indexed by FA, as well as deficits in emotion evaluation and social inference. Emotion evaluation and social inference were both highly related to white matter quality in the CC body and splenium. References Christidi, F., Bigler, E. D., McCauley, S. R., Schnelle, K. P., Merkley, T. L., Mors, M. B., ... & Wilde, E. A. (2011). Diffusion tensor imaging of the perforant pathway zone and its relation to memory function in patients with severe traumatic brain injury. Journal of neurotrauma, 28(5), 711-725. Keywords: Diffusion Tensor Imaging, Traumatic Brain Injury, Corpus Callosum, The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT), social cognition, Diffuse Axonal Injury Conference: ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Sydney, Australia, 2 Dec - 4 Dec, 2015. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Psychophysiology Citation: Dalton KI, Rushby JA, Parks N, Allen SK and McDonald S (2015). Diffusion tensor imaging in traumatic brain injury to examine pathological links with social. Conference Abstract: ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.219.00041 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 21 Oct 2015; Published Online: 30 Nov 2015. * Correspondence: Miss. Katie I Dalton, University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia, k.dalton@unsw.edu.au Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Katie I Dalton Jacqueline A Rushby Nicklas Parks Samantha K Allen Skye McDonald Google Katie I Dalton Jacqueline A Rushby Nicklas Parks Samantha K Allen Skye McDonald Google Scholar Katie I Dalton Jacqueline A Rushby Nicklas Parks Samantha K Allen Skye McDonald PubMed Katie I Dalton Jacqueline A Rushby Nicklas Parks Samantha K Allen Skye McDonald Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Background22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) is a common recurrent neurogenetic condition associated with elevated risk for developmental neuropsychiatric disorders and intellectual disability. Children and adults with 22q11DS often exhibit marked social impairment as well as neurocognitive deficits, and have elevated rates of both autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and psychosis. However, the relationship between the basic processes of social cognition and cognitive ability has not been well studied in 22q11DS. Here, we examined differences in social cognition in 22q11DS, relative to multiple groups of idiopathic neuropsychiatric disorders, and typically developing healthy controls (HC). Additionally, we examined differences in intellectual functioning and its relationship to social cognitive abilities. Finally, we examined the relationship between social cognitive abilities and real-world social behavior.MethodsWe examined social cognition and intellectual functioning in 273 participants (mean age = 17.74 ± 5.18% female = 44.3%): 50 with 22q11DS, 49 youth with first episode psychosis (FEP), 48 at clinical high-risk (CHR) for psychosis, 24 participants with ASD, and 102 HC. Social cognition was assessed using The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT), while reciprocal social behavior was assessed via parent/caregiver ratings on the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS). Participants were also administered the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, 2nd edition (WASI-II) to assess intellectual functioning.ResultsThe 22q11DS group exhibited significantly lower social cognitive abilities compared to CHR, FEP, and HC groups after controlling for intellectual functioning, but not in comparison to the ASD group. Significant positive correlations were found between social cognition, as measured by the TASIT and IQ across groups. In contrast, no significant relationships were found between TASIT and real-world social behavior (SRS) for any group.ConclusionsOur findings indicate social cognitive deficits are more prominent in 22q11DS than idiopathic neuropsychiatric conditions across the age range, even after adjusting for global intellectual function. These results contribute to our understanding of the intellectual and social vulnerabilities of 22q11DS in comparison to idiopathic neuropsychiatric disorders. Our findings of robust associations between intellectual ability and social cognition emphasizes the importance of accounting for neurocognitive deficits in social skills interventions and tailoring these existing treatment models for 22q11DS and other populations with intellectual impairment.

Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in children and adolescents can impair social cognition and communication skills but there are few assessment tools suitable for adolescents. The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) uses professionally enacted audiovisual vignettes of everyday conversational exchanges and is a valid measure of social perception disorders in adults. This study examined its utility for assessing impairments in social cognition in a group of 16 adolescents with TBI, compared to a group of 16 typically developing (TD) adolescents. Adolescents with TBI were, on average, no different to their TD peers on TASIT 1 (emotion recognition) and TASIT 3 (recognizing lies and sarcasm when provided with additional cues) but performed more poorly on TASIT 2 which required them to interpret sarcastic and sincere conversational exchanges with few cues other than the demeanor of the speakers. Within the TBI group, poor performance on TASIT correlated to both relative and self-reported communication difficulties at home. It also correlated with IQ, face recognition and severity of injury as indexed by duration of post-traumatic amnesia. Overall, this study suggests TASIT is a valid measure for adolescents although it raised questions as to how effective normative data is for comparing performance in social cognition during childhood and adolescence.

Objective: The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) is an ecologically valid test of complex social perception. Despite its utility for detecting social perception deficits in clinical groups, its lengthy administration time has limited its routine use in clinical practice. This paper describes the development and validation of a shortened version of the TASIT (TASIT-S) in 160 individuals (males = 129) with moderate to severe acquired brain injury (ABI).Method: Both Rasch and confirmatory factor analysis modeling were used to create the TASIT-S, which, consistent with the original test, included the following subtests: (1) Emotion Evaluation Test (10 items), assessing basic emotion recognition; (2) Social Inference (Minimal) Test (9 items), assessing understanding of sincere and sarcastic exchanges; and (3) Social Inference (Enriched) Test (9 items), assessing comprehension of lies and sarcasm.Results: The TASIT-S demonstrated excellent construct validity as evidenced by its high correlations with the original TASIT and correlations with social cognition and cognitive neuropsychological measures. Importantly, the TASIT-S also successfully differentiated between ABI participants and healthy controls (n = 43).Conclusions: The new shortened version of the TASIT is a promising new tool with excellent psychometric properties that can assist clinicians with the detection of complex social perception deficits in ABI.

Measurement of social cognition in treatment trials remains problematic due to poor and limited psychometric data for many tasks. As part of the Social Cognition Psychometric Evaluation (SCOPE) study, the psychometric properties of 8 tasks were assessed. One hundred and seventy-nine stable outpatients with schizophrenia and 104 healthy controls completed the battery at baseline and a 2-4-week retest period at 2 sites. Tasks included the Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ), Bell Lysaker Emotion Recognition Task (BLERT), Penn Emotion Recognition Task (ER-40), Relationships Across Domains (RAD), Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (Eyes), The Awareness of Social Inferences Test (TASIT), Hinting Task, and Trustworthiness Task. Tasks were evaluated on: (i) test-retest reliability, (ii) utility as a repeated measure, (iii) relationship to functional outcome, (iv) practicality and tolerability, (v) sensitivity to group differences, and (vi) internal consistency. The BLERT and Hinting task showed the strongest psychometric properties across all evaluation criteria and are recommended for use in clinical trials. The ER-40, Eyes Task, and TASIT showed somewhat weaker psychometric properties and require further study. The AIHQ, RAD, and Trustworthiness Task showed poorer psychometric properties that suggest caution for their use in clinical trials.

Social perception is an important skill. One assessment that is commonly used to assess social perception abilities is The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT). The only normative data available for this test are for Australian younger adults. Despite no normative data being available for British adults, the test is widely used in the UK with older and younger adults. There is a growing body of research that suggests that older adults have difficulty with skills associated with social perception. There is therefore a need to determine whether British adults, and more specifically British older adults, perform similarly to the Australian normative TASIT scores available in the manual. To explore the differences between older and younger British adults' performance on TASIT, and to determine whether younger and older British adults perform similarly to the data from Australian adults in TASIT manual. TASIT was administered to a total of 42 native British English speaking participants. The participants were split into two age groups 18-45 and 60-90 years. Comparisons were made between the two groups and the Australian data in TASIT manual. The younger British and Australian adults obtained similar scores on all parts of TASIT. The older British adults though, obtained significantly lower scores than the Australian younger adults on all parts of TASIT and when education was controlled for they obtained significantly lower scores than the British younger adults. The findings are discussed in the light of previous research that has found that older adults are worse than younger adults at social inferences. The findings of the current study suggest that caution should be used when using TASIT with older British adults to assess social perception abilities.