Social Behavior and Impairments in Social Cognition Following Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

Method: Forty participants with TBI and 32 matched healthy participants completed a battery of tests assessing the three functions of interest. In addition, self-and proxy reports of pre-and post-injury behaviour, mood, and community integration were collected. Results:The TBI group performed significantly poorer than the comparison group on all tasks of emotion recognition, understanding intention and on one task of response selection. Ratings of current behaviour suggested significant changes in the TBI group relative to before the injury and showed significantly poorer community integration and interpersonal behaviour than the comparison group. Of the three functions considered, emotion recognition was associated with both post-injury behaviour and community integration and this association could not be fully explained by injury severity, time since injury or education. Conclusions:The current study confirmed earlier findings of associations between emotion recognition and post-TBI behaviour, providing partial evidence for models proposing emotion recognition as one of the pre-requisites for adequate social functioning.. May. Social behaviour and social cognition impairments 3

The relationship between social cognition and participation in the long term after stroke

“…Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that theory of mind (ToM), empathy, emotion recognition and behavioural control were not associated with restrictions in participation three to four years after stroke. This is inconsistent with the reported relationship between emotion perception and participation in stroke in a previous study (Cooper et al, 2014) and with the literature on the relationship between social cognition and participation in moderate to severe TBI (May et al, 2017;Ubukata et al, 2014;Westerhof-Evers et al, 2018). Several factors may contribute to these contradictory findings.…”

“…Studies in patients with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) support the relationship between social cognition and participation (May et al, 2017;Ubukata et al, 2014) and indicate that social cognition is an even stronger predictor than executive functioning (Westerhof-Evers, Fasotti, van der Naalt, & Spikman, 2018). Despite evidence for the role of social cognition in participation in severe TBI, the literature on this relationship in stroke patients is limited to the study of Cooper et al (2014), who report an association between emotion perception deficits and reduced participation, as well as a reduced quality of life.…”

Sex and Gender Differences in Emotion Recognition and Theory of Mind After TBI: A Narrative Review and Directions for Future Research

“…Differences generally are small (e.g., accounting for <10% of variance in scores) and are mostly for threat-related affective displays. Analysis of 14,000 samples of written and spoken language showed that women also used more emotion words (e.g., happy, certainty, nervous, and hate) than men, and fewer swear words (31), although again effect sizes were small [i.e., [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22].…”

“…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 (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, and use that information to make predictions about others' actions (9). We chose these two aspects of social cognition because they have been linked to broader social outcomes like quality of life and social reintegration, both conceptually (10)(11)(12), and empirically (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20). We consider data from typical adults and adults with TBI, in the broader context of common stereotypes about social skills and behaviors in men vs. women.…”

Cognition and Intervention in Traumatic Brain Injury

“…Overall, these findings imply that cognitive, affective and conative ToM may be predicted imminently through the individual differences in structures of different neural systems-the Cerebro-Cerebellar Mentalizing Network, Salience Network, and Mirror Neuron/Empathy Network, in each turn. TBI patients were observed to perform markedly worse than the healthy-volunteer control group with regard to all of the tests of emotion recognition, intention-comprehension, and on one particular task of response selection that together describe social learning [18].…”