Recognition Of Complex Mental States Research Articles

The FACE test: a new neuropsychological task to assess the recognition of complex mental states from faces

BackgroundSocial cognition deficits are reported in several neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, the availability of tasks for the clinical assessment is still limited, preventing the full characterization of socio-cognitive dysfunctions in neurological patients. This study aims to present a new task to assess the recognition of complex mental states from faces (FACE test), reporting normative data for the Italian population and an example of its clinical application to 40 PD patients.MethodsTwo-hundred twenty-nine Italian participants with at least 5 years of education were enrolled. Data were analyzed according to the method of equivalent scores; test-retest reliability and convergent validity were assessed. Two short versions of the FACE test were defined for clinical and research purposes. The prevalence of deficits in the FACE test was computed in the PD sample, as well as correlations with cognitive performance and diagnostic accuracy.ResultsRegression analyses revealed significant effects of demographic variables on FACE performance, with younger and more educated individuals showing higher scores. Twenty-eight percent of PD patients showed borderline/pathological performance, which was correlated with emotion recognition/attribution abilities, and attentive-executive functions. The FACE test was accurate (80%) in distinguishing PD patients with socio-cognitive dysfunctions from both controls and PD patients without emotion recognition/attribution difficulties.ConclusionThe FACE test represents a new tool assessing the ability to recognize complex mental states from facial expressions. Overall, these results support its use in both clinical and research settings, as well as the presence of affective processing deficits in a subsample of PD patients.

Effects of stimulus-related variables on mental states recognition in Huntington’s disease

Background: Cognitive abnormalities in Huntington’s Disease (HD) can involve the specific impairment of the social perspective taking as well as difficulties in recognizing others’ mental state many years before the onset of motor symptoms.Aims: At the scope of assessing how the difficulties in mental state recognition might be an HD early sign before motor symptoms appear, our study was aimed to investigate how the recognition of others’ mental states in HD subjects is moderated by different stimulus related features (gender, difficulty (low, medium, high), and valence (positive, negative, neutral) of the mental states that are to be recognized).Methods: Subjects with premanifest (n = 20) and manifest (n = 40) HD performed the revised ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test’ and were compared with age-matched healthy controls (HC, 40 subjects per cohort).Results: Our results highlight an early impairment in mental state recognition preceding manifest HD symptoms and a deterioration of these abilities with HD progression. Moreover, we found in HD premanifest subjects an impairment concerning the recognition of negative and neutral mental states, as well as of mental states with moderate recognition difficulty. Finally, we found that participant gender did not influence the performance in recognizing others’ mental states, while all participants recognized mental states displayed by females more accurately than those displayed by males.Conclusions: We conclude that difficulties in the recognition of complex mental states can be considered as an early sign of HD, before evident behavioral manifestations, and peculiar features of the stimulus influence it.

Theory of mind can be impaired prior to motor onset in Huntington's disease.

Patients with the inherited movement disorder Huntington's disease (HD) exhibit deficits in executive functions and theory of mind (ToM). We investigated these abilities in individuals with the HD gene who were yet to exhibit motor onset. Participants were HD gene carriers (n = 20) and healthy controls (n = 26). Gene carriers were prescreened for motor symptoms. Participants completed tasks assessing the understanding of socially inappropriate behaviors, recognition of complex mental states from photographs of peoples' eyes, everyday perspective taking, and executive functions. Gene carriers' task performance was compared to controls', and relationships were explored between ToM, executive functions, and clinical factors including disease burden and mood disorder. Performance was intact on nine of the ten executive measures in premanifest HD, with only a mild deficit in semantic fluency. However, gene carriers exhibited impairments in recognizing faux pas and complex mental states. The Interpersonal Reactivity Index yielded evidence of reduced everyday perspective taking in HD, and differences for empathy and personal distress. Everyday perspective taking was predicted by disease burden and recognition of complex mental states. We provide evidence that premanifest HD can be associated with changes in ToM. Furthermore, these deficits appear unlikely to result from executive dysfunction. HD gene carriers' impairments highlight the possibility of a relatively selective impact of early neurodegenerative changes in the striatum on ToM. Neuroimaging studies should investigate whether ToM deficits may arise in premanifest HD because of early neuropathology rather than the psychological effects of diagnostic status.

Theory of mind performance in women with posttraumatic stress disorder related to childhood abuse

Key questions remain unaddressed concerning the nature of interpersonal functioning in trauma survivors, including the ability to understand and interpret other people's thoughts and feelings. Here, we investigate theory of mind (ToM) performance of women with PTSD related to childhood abuse in comparison to healthy controls. Participants completed two ToM tasks, the Interpersonal Perception Task-15 (IPT-15) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task - Revised (RMET). Relative to controls, women with a history of childhood trauma had difficulty recognizing familial relationships depicted in the IPT-15 (P = 0.005). No other category of the IPT-15 showed significant group differences. In addition, while healthy women displayed faster RMET reaction times to emotionally valenced mental states (positive: P = 0.003; negative: P = 0.016) compared with neutral mental states, the PTSD group showed similar reaction times across all valences. The presence of dissociative symptoms (e.g., disengagement, amnesia, identity dissociation) was strongly associated with hindered accuracy of complex mental state identification and altered perception of kinship interactions. Women with PTSD stemming from childhood trauma show changes in ToM abilities particularly those often involved in the interpretation of family interactions. In addition, individuals with PTSD showed slower reaction times during the recognition of complex mental states from emotionally salient facial/eye expressions in comparison with healthy subjects.

Impaired eye expression recognition in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia has been associated with abnormalities in recognising social emotions, inferring others' mental states and in gaze and visual scanning behaviours. Eye expression is known to convey considerable information in normal circumstances. Our study assessed the ability of individuals with schizophrenia to recognise simple and complex mental states from eye expressions alone. Sixteen individuals with a DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia following SCAN [Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (Wing JK, Babor T, Brugha T, Burke J, Cooper JE, Giel R et al. SCAN: schedules for clinical assessment in neuropsychiatry. Archives of General Psychiatry 1990;47:589–593).] interview and 16 healthy controls acted as participants. Expressions of 10 emotions (e.g. happy, afraid) and 10 complex mental states (e.g. thoughtful, bored), in the form of pictures of whole faces or eyes alone, were presented for recognition using a forced-choice response design. We observed impaired recognition of complex mental states in individuals with schizophrenia, from eye expressions alone ( P=0.012). No differences in the recognition of basic emotions were detected. We also observed a negative correlation between illness chronicity and expression recognition performance ( r=−0.65, P=0.006). The reduced ability of schizophrenia patients to recognise eye expressions of complex mental states could be interpreted as supporting a lack of “theory of mind”. However, more parsimonious explanations based on impairments in basic recognition processes could also apply. An awareness of these processing abnormalities may have implications for future therapeutic strategies and our understanding of the pathophysiology of the disorder.