Autor: Ineco

El presente trabajo analiza las variables que inciden en la reincidencia penal. Se analizaron 333 casos del Hospital Psiquiátrico del Servicio Penitenciario Federal Argentino, con el objetivo de hallar diversos indicadores que se asocien al riesgo de reincidencia. Los resultados indican con un grado de significación (p < 0.01), que la edad de inicio de consumo de drogas y la presencia de antecedentes penales se asocian con la reincidencia delictiva. También el nivel educativo presentó una fuerte asociación (p=.006). La presencia de trastornos mentales no ha resultado estadísticamente significativa como variable pronóstico de reincidencia (p=.218), pero en el análisis de ese factor se pudo advertir una diferencia en la tendencia del tipo de delito cometido entre el grupo de personas con diagnóstico de psicosis y el grupo de personas con trastornos de la personalidad. Este tipo de información puede aportar en la toma de decisiones a la hora de planificar o implementar políticas públicas vinculadas a la prevención y a la inclusión social.

Emerging theories on embodied cognition have caused high expectations, ambitious promises, and strong controversies. Several criticisms have been explained elsewhere (Mahon and Caramazza, 2008; Cardona et al., 2014) and will not be discussed further here. In this paper, we will focus on a specific explanatory strategy frequently assessed by the radical embodied cognition approaches: the use of homuncular explanations for the explicit (or implicit) attribution of causal roles in the comprehension of language understanding. We first present this criticism regarding a prototypical example: the mirror neuron system (MNS) (Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004; Iacoboni and Dapretto, 2006) in the field of language understanding and then extend our conclusions to other programs of embodied cognition. Here we discuss the radical claims that propose the MNS as the putative mechanism for multiple cognitive and social psychology constructs (e.g., Gallese, 2008; Cattaneo and Rizzolatti, 2009; Iacoboni, 2009) and the critical role of the MNS in language understanding (Heyes, 2010a; Hickok, 2013).

En este trabajo se reportan por primera vez los correlatos cerebrales del procesamiento emocional en ex-guerrilleros colombianos (EGC) que participaron en actividades armadas. Aunque los EGC presentaron correlatos cerebrales de procesamiento emocional preservado, se observaron señales neuronales exacerbadas asociadas a la saliencia emocional de los estímulos. Dicha anomalía estuvo asociada a los niveles de empatía y funciones ejecutivas entre los EGC.

En este trabajo se revisa el solapamiento genético y neuropatológico de la demencia frontotemporal (DFT) y la esclerosis lateral amiotrófica (ELA), en particular respecto al descubrimiento de la TDP43 (Transactive Response DNA Binding Protein 43 kDa) y la expansión del intron del C9ORF72 (cromosoma 9p21). Finalmente se destaca la necesidad de una aproximación multinivel a estas patologías en base registros nacionales.

Este estudio evaluó los componentes múltiples de la empatía por dolor (afectivos, cognitivos, morales) en pacientes con demencia frontotemporal (bvFTD) mediante una tarea experimental que presenta acciones cotidianas. Aunque los pacientes presentaron déficits in los tres dominios, solamente la dimensión propiamente empática (empathic concern) resultó ser un déficit primario, no relacionado ni explicado por otros déficits de funciones ejecutivas u otras tareas de cognición social. Dichos resultados son cruciales tanto para la clínica de la bvFTD como para los modelos neuroanatómicos de la empatía.

Impaired social cognition has been claimed to be a mechanism underlying the development and maintenance of borderline personality disorder (BPD). One important aspect of social cognition is the theory of mind (ToM), a complex skill that seems to be influenced by more basic processes, such as executive functions (EF) and emotion recognition. Previous ToM studies in BPD have yielded inconsistent results. This study assessed the performance of BPD adults on ToM, emotion recognition, and EF tasks. We also examined whether EF and emotion recognition could predict the performance on ToM tasks. We evaluated 15 adults with BPD and 15 matched healthy controls using different tasks of EF, emotion recognition, and ToM. The results showed that BPD adults exhibited deficits in the three domains, which seem to be task-dependent. Furthermore, we found that EF and emotion recognition predicted the performance on ToM. Our results suggest that tasks that involve real-life social scenarios and contextual cues are more sensitive to detect ToM and emotion recognition deficits in BPD individuals. Our findings also indicate that (a) ToM variability in BPD is partially explained by individual differences on EF and emotion recognition; and (b) ToM deficits of BPD patients are partially explained by the capacity to integrate cues from face, prosody, gesture, and social context to identify the emotions and others’ beliefs.

IMPORTANCE: Several clinical reports have stated that patients with prefrontal lesions or patients with the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia share social cognition impairments. Moral reasoning is impaired in both conditions but there have been few investigations that directly compare this domain in the 2 groups. OBSERVATIONS: This work compared the moral judgments of these patient groups using a task designed to disentangle the contributions of intentions and outcomes in moral judgment. For both disorders, patients judged scenarios where the protagonists believed that they would cause harm but did not as being more permissible than the control group. Moreover, patients with frontotemporal dementia judged harmful outcomes in the absence of harmful intentions as less permissible than the control participants. There were no differences between the 2 conditions. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Both disorders involved impairments in integrating intention and outcome information for moral judgment. This study was the first, to our knowledge, to directly compare a social cognition domain in 2 frontal pathologies with different etiology. Our results highlighted the importance of comparing patients with vascular lesions and patients with neurodegenerative diseases.

Vascular dementia (VaD) is one of the most prevalent causes of dementia, and it is frequently misdiagnosed and undertreated in clinical practice. Because neuropsychological outcome depends, among other factors, on the size and location of the vascular brain injury, characterizing the cognitive profile of VaD has been especially challenging. Yet, there has been sufficient evidence to show a marked impairment of attention and executive functions, in particular in relation to Alzheimer disease. Being able to detect these deficits at bedside is crucial for everyday clinical practice, and yet, brief cognitive screening toots such as the Mini-Mental Sate Examination (MMSE) may overlook at cognitive deficits typical of patients with VaD. The Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination Revised (ACE-R) is also a brief cognitive screening tool designed to incorporate the items of the MMSE and further extend the test to assess orientation, attention, verbal fluency, memory, language, and visuospatial abilities. In this study, we investigated the ability of the Spanish version of the ACE-R to detect the cognitive impairment showed in patients with subcortical ischemic vascular dementia, and we compared its usefulness to that of the MMSE in this population. Scores on these tests were compared to those of patients with Alzheimer disease and matched healthy controls. The 88-point cut-off proposed for the ACE-R was associated with a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 100% for the detection of cognitive impairment, demonstrating a stronger capacity than the MMSE (sensitivity of 42% with its 23-point cut-off score). We also found that the verbal fluency subtest of the ACE-R may be potentially useful in discriminating patients with subcortical ischemic vascular dementia from patients with AD. We discuss the utility of these findings in the context of everyday clinical practice and we propose that future studies should evaluate the potential usefulness of combining the ACE-R with a brief screening tool of executive functioning.

We sought to investigate the decision making profile of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) by assessing patients diagnosed with this disease (n = 10), patients diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD, n = 35), and matched controls (n = 14) using the Iowa Gambling Task, a widely used test that mimics real-life decision making. Participants were also evaluated with a complete neuropsychological battery. Patients with PPA were unable to adopt an advantageous strategy on the IGT, which resulted in a flat performance, different to that exhibited by both controls (who showed advantageous decision making) and bvFTD patients (who showed risk-appetitive behavior). The decision making profile of PPA patients was not associated with performance on language tasks and did not differ between sub-variants of the disease (namely, semantic dementia and progressive nonfluent aphasia). Investigating decision making in PPA is crucial both from a theoretical perspective, as it can shed light about the way in which language interacts with other cognitive functions, as well as a clinical standpoint, as it could lead to a more objective detection of impairments of decision making deficits in this condition.

BACKGROUND: The ability to integrate contextual information with social cues to generate social meaning is a key aspect of social cognition. It is widely accepted that patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorders have deficits in social cognition; however, previous studies on these disorders did not use tasks that replicate everyday situations.

METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: This study evaluates the performance of patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorders on social cognition tasks (emotional processing, empathy, and social norms knowledge) that incorporate different levels of contextual dependence and involvement of real-life scenarios. Furthermore, we explored the association between social cognition measures, clinical symptoms and executive functions. Using a logistic regression analysis, we explored whether the involvement of more basic skills in emotional processing predicted performance on empathy tasks. The results showed that both patient groups exhibited deficits in social cognition tasks with greater context sensitivity and involvement of real-life scenarios. These deficits were more severe in schizophrenic than in bipolar patients. Patients did not differ from controls in tasks involving explicit knowledge. Moreover, schizophrenic patients’ depression levels were negatively correlated with performance on empathy tasks.

CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Overall performance on emotion recognition predicted performance on intentionality attribution during the more ambiguous situations of the empathy task. These results suggest that social cognition deficits could be related to a general impairment in the capacity to implicitly integrate contextual cues. Important implications for the assessment and treatment of individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, as well as for neurocognitive models of these pathologies are discussed.