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A novel task assessing intention and emotion attribution: Italian standardization and normative data of the Story-based Empathy Task

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Abstract

Theory of Mind (ToM), the process by which an individual imputes mental states to himself and others, is presently considered as a multidimensional cognitive domain, with two main facets (i.e., cognitive and affective ToM) accounting, respectively, for the ability to understand others’ intention (intention attribution-IA) and emotions (emotion attribution-EA). Despite the large amount of literature investigating the behavioural and neural bases of mentalizing abilities in neurological conditions, there is still a lack of validated neuropsychological tools specifically designed to assess such skills. Here, we report the normative data of the Story-Based Empathy Task (SET), a non-verbal test developed for the assessment of intention and emotion attribution in the neurodegenerative conditions characterized by the impairment of social–emotional abilities. It is an easy-to-administer task including 18 stimuli, sub-grouped into two experimental conditions assessing, respectively, the ability to infer others’ intentions (SET-IA) and emotions (SET-EA), compared to a control condition of causal inference (SET-CI). Normative data were collected in 136 Italian subjects pooled across subgroups homogenous for age (range 20–79 years), sex, and education (at least 5 years). The results show a detrimental effect of age and a beneficial effect of education on both the global score and each subscale, for which we provide correction grids. This new task could be a useful tool to investigate both affective and cognitive aspects of ToM in the course of disorders of socio-emotional behaviour, such as the fronto-temporal dementia spectrum.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by the MIUR grant “I meccanismi neurocognitivi alla base delle interazioni sociali” (PRIN2010XPMFW4_008), and by the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca CARIPLO grant“ Dottorato ad alta Formazione in Psicologia Sperimentale, Linguistica e Neuroscienze Cognitive”. Dr. Chiara Cerami was funded by Fondazione Eli-Lilly Grant 2011.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Via Olgettina 58, 20134, Milan, Italy

    Alessandra Dodich, Chiara Cerami, Chiara Crespi, Giada Lettieri & Daniela Perani

  2. Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, Division of Neuroscience, IRCCS San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan, Italy

    Alessandra Dodich, Chiara Cerami, Nicola Canessa, Chiara Crespi, Daniela Perani & Stefano F. Cappa

  3. Department of Clinical Neurosciences, San Raffaele Hospital, Milan, Italy

    Chiara Cerami, Sandro Iannaccone & Alessandra Marcone

  4. NeTS Center-Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS), Pavia, Italy

    Nicola Canessa & Stefano F. Cappa

  5. Experimental Biomedicine and Clinical Neuroscience Department (BioNeC), University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Sabrina Realmuto

  6. Nuclear Medicine Unit, San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan, Italy

    Daniela Perani

Authors
  1. Alessandra Dodich
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  2. Chiara Cerami
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  3. Nicola Canessa
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  4. Chiara Crespi
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  7. Sabrina Realmuto
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  8. Giada Lettieri
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  9. Daniela Perani
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  10. Stefano F. Cappa
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Correspondence to Alessandra Dodich.

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Dodich, A., Cerami, C., Canessa, N. et al. A novel task assessing intention and emotion attribution: Italian standardization and normative data of the Story-based Empathy Task. Neurol Sci 36, 1907–1912 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-015-2281-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-015-2281-3

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