Social Cognition in Multiple Sclerosis: A Multidomain Investigation

While cognitive functioning in multiple sclerosis has been extensively studied, the presence of social cognition deficits in persons affected by relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) remains comparatively less explored. This study recruited 30 Turkish patients with RRMS and 30 healthy controls (HCs) matched for demographic characteristics and cognitive status. We tested their social cognition abilities within two main subdomains, namely, theory of mind (ToM) and emotion recognition. The combination of tests we used was novel and rather broad as ToM was evaluated in both its affective and cognitive components while emotion recognition was evaluated in two tasks requiring either naming or discriminating facial expressions. All tests required verbal responses and were scored in terms of accuracy. The results indicated that patients with RRMS exhibited significantly lower accuracy compared to the HC group across all social cognition tasks. Correlation analyses revealed a significant negative relationship between emotion discrimination performance and both level of disability and disease duration. Additionally, RRMS patients showed significant deficits in recognizing negative emotions, while no differences with the HC group were observed for positive emotion recognition. The presence of a domain-specific, selective deficit for social cognition was also confirmed after further controlling for overall cognitive functioning. Our findings capitalize on previous evidence demonstrating that social cognition impairments in RRMS have domain-specific characteristics and can be reliably detected in a new cultural context.