Assessment of Social Cognition and Theory of Mind: Initial Validation of the Geneva Social Cognition Scale.

Background: Social cognition is widely studied in neurology. At present, such evaluations are designed for research or for specific diseases and simple general clinical tools are lacking. We propose a clinical evaluation tool for social cognition, the Geneva Social Cognition Scale (GeSoCS).

Direction of Biological Motion Affects Early Brain Activation: A Link with Social Cognition.

A number of EEG studies have investigated the time course of brain activation for biological movement over this last decade, however the temporal dynamics of processing are still debated. Moreover, the role of direction of movement has not received much attention even though it is an essential component allowing us to determine the intentions of the moving agent, and thus permitting the anticipation of potential social interactions. In this study, we examined event-related responses (ERPs) in 15 healthy human participants to light point walkers and their scrambled counterparts, whose movements occurred either in the radial or in the lateral plane.

Emotional expressions modulate low α and β oscillations in a cortically blind patient.

Studies of cortical blindness have suggested that some residual visual function may persist without perceptual awareness, a condition known as blindsight. To investigate electrophysiological evidence of unconscious processing of emotional stimuli, we examined the event-related oscillations (EROs) in a 62year-old male patient (TN) with affective blindsight during random stimulation of three facial expressions (fearful, happy and neutral). Spectral power analysis in response to the different emotions revealed significant differences between fearful and happy faces over the right frontal regions at 7-8Hz (low α), and between emotional and neutral faces over the left frontal sites at 12-13Hz (low β) in a time period between 100-400ms after visual stimulus onset.