Aims and hypotheses

The aim o f die current s tu ^ was to examine die performance o f TBl adults on real-life-type social tasks involving die interpretation o f verbal social information and to compare this to performance on non-social neuropsychological tests o f attention and executive fimctioiL Higher-level theory-of-mind-type sodal comprdiension tasks were also included.

The social tasks consisted o f a pragmatic judgment task, a social skill judgment task and a conversation judgment task. These tasks were designed for the purposes o f this stucty.

1.18.1. Pragmatic judgment task

This task aimed to examine the interpretation o f direct (literal) and indirect (non-literal) qieech acts present^ in a written form. The ta ^ consisted o f a series o f itan s each presmting a brief conversation between characters in everyday social settings. Altenative literal and non-literal responses were provided by one character. These responses varied in their degree o f context appropriateness. It was considered important m tiiis stucty to examine the extent to which participants were able to differentiate between the appropriateness o f these direci and indirect responses. The ability to make subtle context-dependent judgments and infermces based iqxm

d ififer^ verbal information is likely to be important in social functioning. This issue had not b e ^ examined in die previous TBl studies looking at pragmatic in ^ e a ce . Thus, it was necessary to consider the most effective way to elicit this information. Previous studies had adopted closed and open response formats to access participant's pragmatic understanding. For example, closed formats have bear used in asking participants to say whedier qieech acts were insincere or not or in requiring diem to choose the best response from a selection (e.g. McDonald and Pearce, 1996). In contrast, an open format has been adopted m asking participants to freely describe their understanding (e.g. Bara ^ al, 1997). It was decided that a closed response format would be most usefrd in this s tu ^ . Rather dian selecting one alternative response or ordering them, participants would be asked to rate each in turn. This would provide information on both which response they ranked the highest and how much difference existed between their ratings.

1.18.2. Social skill judgment task

The aim o f this task was to examine judgments about the skillfidness o f written verbal interactions between characters in different everyday social contexts. Interpr^ations about die degree o f skill involved in verbal interactions had not been examined in TBl patients. The format o f the task was similar to die pragmatic judgment task, except the alternative responses varied in terms o f die level o f skillfidness. Each required a rating in terms o f how socially skilled they were in die context. Similar to the pragmatic judgment task, it was likefy that paform ance on this task would also require die ability to infer meaning. However, it was considered that performance woidd also require particular appreciation o f die characters intention and the interpersonal impact o f die responses. The responses would be presented in turn. Thus, this task would also provide information on both which response diey ranked highest and how much difference existed between dieir ratings.

1.18.3. Conversation judgment task

It was acknowledged that inteipretnig v a ta l information relied not only on appreciating language but also para-Unguistic information, such as tone o f voice and prosocfy o f q^eecL The conversation judgm ait task was an attempt to examine die intapretation o f bodi language and pararlanguage. The task presented an audible convasation between two people in a 'real­ tim e' form at Judgments about die manner o f the two people in addition to rating aspects o f their para-language were required This task dierefore provided a real-life-type examination o f performance.

It was accepted that these three tasks reflected overlapping areas o f social intapretation. Furthomore, it was likely tliat multiple cognitive processes would contribute to task performance. In foct, the tasks were exploratory in the sense that no qieciflc claims were made about underlying cognitive processes, although it was considered that performance m y ^ be related to measures o f attention, executive function and higher-order theory o f m ind

The study i^pecifically examined the following hypotheses:

# TBl adults will perform significantly more poorly than healthy controls on three social interpretation measures: a pragmatic judgement task, a social skill judgm oit task, and a conversation judgment task.

TBl adults will perform significantly more poorly than healtl^ controls on non­ social neuropsychological measures o f attm tion and executive fimctioning.

A significant relationship might exist such that poorer performance on the three social interpr^ation tasks will be associated with poorer performance on the non-

social n^iropsydiologica] measures o f attention and executive functioning in the TBl adults.

• TBl adults will perform significantly more poorly dian healAy controls on measures o f higher-level Aeoiy-of-mind-type social comprehension.

• A significant relationship might exist such that poorer performance on Ae three social mterpretation tasks will be associated wiA poorer performance on Ae measures o f theory-of-mind-type social comprehension m the TBl adults.

2. METHOD

2 1 . Desigg

A betweoi subjects design was used to compare seventeen adults widi TBl to seventeen healthy controls.