News
01/2024
Mini-SEA: Validity and Normative Data for the French-Quebec Population
Thanks to Carol Hudon and Hannah Mulet-Perreault, the mini-SEA has now normative data for the middle-aged and elderly French-Quebec population. A tremendous help for the clinician communitee in Québec that could now use the Fench-Québec adaptation of the tool. Well done !
01/2024
Heterogeneous factors influence social cognition across diverse settings in brain health and age-related diseases
Social diversity is a critical dimension for understanding brain health, the effects of aging, and neurodegenerative diseases. It must be considered in its various aspects: age, gender, social determinants of health, socioeconomic status, cultural background, education, quality of life, and levels of cognitive or affective abilities. For the first time, we have shown through a study involving 1063 individuals that diversity has a profound influence on social cognitive abilities. This study, conducted in 9 countries through the INSCD networks (which our team coordinates), the Chilean GERO, and RedLat, a Latin American consortium, has been published in Nature Mental Health. Congrats to Sol Fittipaldi & Agustin Ibanez for leading this study!
04/2022
mini-SEA in older Peruvians with low educational levels
A study led by Nilton Custodio, Servicio de Neurología, Instituto Peruano de Neurociencias, Lince (Peru) has shown that the mini-SEA could be efficiently added to standard global cognitive measures for screening of bvFTD in a population with low levels of education.
03/2022
Does culture shape our understanding of others' thoughts and emotions?
Read the new INSCD paper accepted in the journal Neuropsychology if you want an answer to this question. In our study, through a large international study across 18 sites, neuropsychologists assessed core aspects of social cognition in 587 participants from 12 countries using traditional and widely used tasks.
02/2022
Validation of the mini-SEA in China
Fen Wang's team in Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University from Beijing (China), member of the INSCD, published a paper validating the Chinese version of the mini-SEA in the early diagnosis of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). The study, which compared control participants with patients with bvFTD and Alzheimer's disease, was published in Frontiers in Neurology (2022, 13, 827945)
06/2021
Argentinian norms of the mini-SEA
Congratulations to Ricardo Francisco Allegri's team from the FLENI Foundation in Argentina, member of the INSCD, who provided the first Argentinian
normative data for the mini-SEA. This study, conducted by the neuropsychologist María Florencia Clarens included 64 healthy Spanish-speaking volunteers between 35 and 80 years old from the Cities of Buenos Aires and La Plata, both in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The paper was published in VERTEX, the Revista Argentina de Psiquiatría (2021). 32(152): 5-10.
12/2020
mini-SEA: French normative data updated
The mini-SEA reference data used since 2006 were limited to 60 individuals recruited in Paris. Although these data were useful for research purpose, this was a bit limited to interpret scores obtained in a clinical context. In this new study led by Maxime Bertoux, member of the INSCD, the data of 150 participants from Paris, Strasbourg and Saint-Denis (La Réunion) were analysed to provide the averaged scores of nine demographical categories that take age, education and gender into consideration. The paper was published in the Revue de Neuropsychologie, vol.12, N.4, 2020.
08/2020
Culture shapes our understanding of other's thoughts & emotions
Our investigation across 12 countries is done, and the preprint is out! We, 57 researchers within the INSCD, compared WEIRD and non-WEIRD populations on classic, gold-standard, social cognition tasks. We retrieved massive differences beteen countries, that explained >20% of the variance observed, after controlling for age, gender, education and linguistic differences. Beyond interpretating this difference, we discuss the problem of universalism and generalization of findings within the field of neurosciences, as well as the negative clinical impacts of such generalization.
03/2020
Social cognition & cultural differences across the world
As the first large-scale project that would involve all partners within the INSCD, we aim to explore and discuss the potential cultural variations at stake in two classical tasks used in neuropsychology that are composing the mini-SEA, i.e. a reduced version of the well-known "Ekman faces", where emotions are considered by many as being universal, and a modified version of the Faux Pas test, aiming to understand social faux pas in specific contexts. The data of 589 control participants have been considered in this study, and results show striking differences due to country, age, education and gender... Stay tuned !
01/2020
National normative data from the INSCD... coming soon!
As collaborative research allows to have more data, teams from Argentina, Brazil, Canada (Quebec), China and France are writting their country-specific article to publish local normative data with the mini-SEA (Social cognition & Emotional Assessment). We will make these publications available on this website later this year, with the author's agreement.
12/2019
A first success for the INSCD's main tool
This is a good news for the mini-SEA (Social cognition & Emotional Assessment): it will be included in the Multi-Partner Consortium to Expand Dementia Research in Latin America, a large multicentric international research program led by Agustin Ibanez. Involving centres in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, México, Perú and USA, the mini-SEA has been selected among other tasks thanks of the experience and popularity acquired through its prior use within the INSCD. Good luck to all for this amazing project!