Measuring social cognition: on a scale of one to ten, how awkward are you?

Hello!

So...I completely forgot to do my blogs over the weekend...whoops. Sorry, Senora Botella!

I think I'll just explain my project first.

I'm at the Cleveland Clinic's Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis Treatment and Research. On second thought, I'm not clear on where I am exactly because the office I have is actually located in the Center for Brain Health, which is maybe a separate department?

In any case, I've been both observing my sponsor work with patients and doing some of my own research in the field of social cognition. Social cognition is essentially the ability that we have to interact socially with those around us. That includes sensing changes in the way others are acting and both interpreting and sending out our own social signals. It's an area that hasn't been explored yet in a lot of depth, in some part due to the somewhat ambiguous definition of social cognition. For example, there isn't a definitive answer to the question: what exactly does it mean to have "good" social cognition?

As far as we know, social cognition is regulated almost exclusively by the frontal lobes of the brain. My sponsor is a neurologist, and while he does see patients that have all sorts of problems with their brains, he sees a lot of patients with diseases that specifically affect the frontal lobes. There are all sorts of symptoms associated with the degeneration of the frontal lobes, including the loss of the ability to plan ahead, impaired multitasking, problem-solving and decision-making skills, etc, which are examples of higher executive functions.

Many of these deficiencies of executive function can be tested to varying degrees by existing neuropsychological tests. You've probably seen some of these before, like the Stroop test (I'll try to post the picture above). It's a pattern of words that describe a color written in a different color. For example, the word "white" might be in brown, and the word "green" might be in red. The challenge is to say the colors that the words are written in, as opposed to the words themselves. Your brain takes longer to come up with the right answer and makes more mistakes when doing this because it has to suppress the more common reaction -reading the word itself. (That reaction is more common because it's what you do more often. The brain forms pathways and connections that allow you to read words quickly and easily, for obvious reasons. Like, school?) This skill of suppressing a certain reaction is called "inhibition."

So if you take this test, for example, and the amount of mistakes you make or the amount of time you take to complete a certain set of words is outside of the normal range, the test could be indicating that you're either uncommonly able to inhibit or that you have a neurological problem.

But while deficiencies of higher executive function indicate that you may have a disease or disorder, frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), which includes frontotemporal dementia (FTD), also causes symptoms like behavior change, lack of social inhibition (the mental barrier that helps you keep your stupid and insensitive comments to yourself), and a decrease in your ability to sense emotions in others or identify the emotions you yourself are feeling. Being able to determine how deficient a patient is in these areas would allow a doctor to more accurately diagnose disorders like FTD and Alzheimer's.

So that's the job my sponsor has given me. Do research in the existing literature on social cognition, try to determine whether there's a test that already exists that can measure social cognition, and if there isn't one (which there probably isn't), try to design one.

I haven't found that test yet. I've mostly been trying to understand the gibberish in the medical textbooks that are supposed to give me a crash course in neurology and neuropsychology.

But design one? I've pretty much given up already, given that some of the world's most brilliant and trained minds haven't found one yet.