An investigation of affective theory of mind ability and its relation to neuropsychological functions in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Although cognitive theory of mind (ToM) has been largely studied within neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease (AD), studies focusing on affective ToM are relatively limited, yielding inconsistent findings. The current study aimed at investigating affective ToM abilities within different stages of AD (mild AD dementia [ADD], mild cognitive impairment [MCI], and subjective cognitive impairment [SCI]), together with its relationship with neuropsychological functioning. Eighty‐one participants were tested with two different ToM tasks (Faux Pas Recognition Test [FPR] and Reading Mind in the Eyes Test [RMET]) and tests of attention, executive functions, episodic memory, and facial recognition. Our results showed two different affective ToM profiles in AD continuum: while ADD group performed poorly on both tasks of ToM, MCI group displayed deteriorated performance on RMET but not on FPR. In addition, ToM performance was significantly related to episodic memory and verbal fluency within the overall sample. These findings suggest that impairment in the decoding process of emotional cues could begin even in the prodromal stage of AD. In contrast, the reasoning process of emotional information, as measured with FPR, could be preserved until the dementia stage. Moreover, the relation of affective ToM with amnestic functions and verbal abilities could provide evidence of a domain‐general ToM impairment in AD.

On the difficulties of building therapeutic relationships when wearing face masks

“…We are now, involuntarily, preforming a quasi live version of the “Reading the mind in the eyes” test on a daily basis. Studies using the traditional version of the test [ 1 ] (in "pre-Coronavirus" research) showed that patients with Alzheimer's dementia are impaired in this test [ 2 ] as are patients with schizophrenia [ 3 ], autism spectrum [ 3 ] or somatoform disorders [ 4 ], while patients with borderline personality disorder actually outperform controls [ 5 ]. Two clusters have been found in bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder with the majority of patients performing similarly to healthy controls [ 6 , 7 ].…”

Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test: Relationship with Neurocognition and Facial Emotion Recognition in Non-Clinical Youths

“…It has been consistently reported in more recent meta-analysis study [ 11 ]. The correlation between neurocognitive function and RMET was also observed in recent studies involving various clinically-ill patients groups, such as Autism spectrum disorder [ 11 ], Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ 21 ], and dementia [ 22 ]. Reasoning by analogy is the ability to understand rules and build abstractions by integrating relationships based on non-social visual information.…”

“…11 The correlation between neurocognitive function and RMET was also observed in recent studies involving various clinically-ill patients groups, such as Autism spectrum disorder, 11 Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, 21 and dementia. 22 Reasoning by analogy is the ability to understand rules and build abstractions by integrating relationships based on non-social visual information. According to the developers of the RMET, 4 when RMET subjects match the descriptors regarding the complex mental state to corresponding part of facial expressions (i.e., the eye region of face), they should map the eyes in each photograph to examples of eye regions from their memory.…”

Role of Neuroinflammation in Autism Spectrum Disorder and the Emergence of Brain Histaminergic System. Lessons Also for BPSD?

“…ToM refers to the ability of an individual to understand the mental states of oneself and others, and depends on executive functions and memory (Castelli et al, 2011). It was reported that 65% of AD dementia patients exhibited cognitive ToM deficits, and these deficits were associate with multiple domains of cognitive impairments (Yildirim et al, 2020). Similar to ACEIs, H3R antagonists are reported to have cognitive enhancing effects with positive results in memory and attention (Nathan et al, 2013), suggesting the important role of histamine in disorders associated with memory and cognitive impairments, and proposing the special role it might have in ToM.…”