Abstract
A growing body of literature has examined sex differences in a variety of outcomes from moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), including outcomes for social functioning. Social functioning is an area in which adults with TBI have significant long-term challenges (1–4), and a better understanding of sex and gender differences in this domain may have a significant clinical impact. This paper presents a brief narrative review of current evidence regarding sex differences in one aspect of social functioning in adults with TBI: social cognition, specifically affect recognition and Theory of Mind (ToM). Data from typical adults and adults with TBI are considered in the broader context of common stereotypes about social skills and behaviors in men vs. women. We then discuss considerations for future research on sex- and gender-based differences in social cognition in TBI, and in adults more generally.
Highlights
In 2001, a U.S Institute of Medicine (IOM) report [5] stated that sex-based differences were a priority area for all research on human health
This paper begins with a brief narrative review of research on sex differences in one aspect of social functioning in adults with moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI): social cognition, defined broadly as the processes used to decode the social world [8]
The review focuses on two aspects of social cognition that have been studied in TBI: recognition of emotions from facial affect; and Theory of Mind
Summary
One challenge in generalizing study results to real life is that most stimuli were some version of the iconic six “basic” emotions popularized by Ekman in the 1970s [32] These canonical stimuli do not capture the subtle and dynamic affect displays encountered in everyday social interactions, and women might be better at reading the latter. To identify articles for the narrative review of TBI studies, we searched PubMed, PsychInfo, CINAHL, and Web of Science using the search string: (emotion recognition OR affect recognition) AND (social cognition OR theory of mind) AND traumatic brain injury AND (sex difference or gender difference), with the limits of human and adult.
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