Low Self-Awareness of Individuals With Severe Traumatic Brain Injury Can Lead to Reduced Ability to Take Another Person's Perspective

Abstract

Aims of this study were (i) to verify whether a deficit or a lack of self-awareness can lead to difficulties in assuming another person's perspective after a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI); (ii) to verify whether perspective-taking deficits emerge more from performance-based tasks than self-reports; and (iii) to evaluate the possible relationships between perspective-taking difficulties and some clinical, neuropsychological, neuropsychiatric, and neuroimaging variables. The Interpersonal Reactivity Index, Empathy Quotient, first-order false-belief, and faux pas written stories were administered to 28 patients with severe TBI and 28 healthy controls. The Awareness Questionnaire was also administered to TBI patients and their caregivers. Patients were split into 2 groups (impaired self-awareness vs adequate self-awareness) on the basis of the discrepancy Awareness Questionnaire score. Both TBI groups obtained lower scores than healthy controls on the Fantasy subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the reality question of the false-belief stories, and the memory questions of the faux pas test. Only impaired self-awareness patients tended to obtain lower scores in first-order false-belief detection. Impaired self-awareness patients also performed significantly worse than both healthy controls and adequate self-awareness patients on the faux pas tasks. The analysis suggests a causal relationship between low self-awareness and perspective-taking difficulties in this population of patients.

Theory of Mind in Adults with Traumatic Brain Injury

“…In the examined studies, 17 ToM tasks had the control questions. Although in most of studies, individuals with TBI were not impaired to answer such questions, there were some exceptions in this case (4,46,56). For example, due to working memory load of some tasks and problems in individuals with TBI, the patients might not process the story correctly.…”

Social Behavior and Impairments in Social Cognition Following Traumatic Brain Injury

“…Croker & McDonald, 2005;Babbage et al, 2011, Ietswaart, Milders, Crawford, Currie & Scott, 2008Spikman, Timmerman, Milders, Veenstra & van der Naalt, 2012;Williams & Wood, 2010). Understanding other people's intentions and beliefs, also referred to as theory of mind (ToM), can also be impaired following TBI (Bibby & McDonald, 2005;Bivona et al, 2014;Geraci, Surian, Ferraro, Cantagallo, 2010;Havet-Thomassin, Allain, Etcharry-Bouyx & Le Gall, 2005;McLellan & Mckinlay, 2013;Milders, Ietswaart, Crawford & Currie, 2006, 2012Muller, Simion, Reviriego, Galera, Mazaux, Barat & Joseph, 2010;Spikman et al, 2012). Selecting appropriate social behaviour in response to the context would rely on adequate executive functioning (Shany-Ur & Rankin, 2013), in particular, flexibility to adjust behaviour in accordance with the situation and inhibition to suppress initial, and possibly inappropriate, responses.…”

Comparación de los procesos de la cognición social entre adultos con trauma craneoencefálico leve, moderado y severo

“…Tales hallazgos son coherentes con lo reportado en diferentes investigaciones en las que se ha encontrado que personas con diferentes grados de severidad de tCe si presentan dificultades en la detección de falsos pasos en contextos sociales complejos (Geraci et al, 2010;Martin-Rodríguez y León-Carrión, 2010;Muller et al, 2010: Bivona et al, 2014Ubukata et al, 2014;Bivona et al, 2015), por lo que estos resultados podrían sugerir que estas personas pueden presentar dificultades en las relaciones interpersonales y tener una implicación en el funcionamiento en el área social, familiar y laboral.…”