Maintaining social skills such as Theory of Mind (ToM) competences is important to counteract the conversion into dementia in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Multidimensional nonpharmacological interventions demonstrated their potential in improving cognitive and behavioral abilities; however, little is known about the long-term effect of such interventions on social skills in people with MCI. The aim of this longitudinal study was to monitor ToM competences considering both cognitive and affective domains in an amnestic MCI (aMCI) sample involved in a home-based multistimulation treatment (MST@H). 30 aMCI subjects (; ) were enrolled, and three steps of evaluation with neuropsychological tests and ToM tasks have been implemented. 21 healthy controls (HC) were also included (; ) to characterize the aMCI sample regarding differences in ToM performance compared to HC at the baseline evaluation. Our results show that the aMCI group statistically significantly underperformed the HC group only in the advanced ToM tasks, confirming an initial decline of high-level ToM competences in this population. The longitudinal evaluation revealed time changes not only in some subcognitive domains of MoCA (memory and executive functions) but also in cognitive and affective ToM dimensions in aMCI subjects. Our findings suggest that cognitive and affective ToM can be considered useful outcome measures to test the long-term effect of treatment over time.

中文翻译：

---

康复环境中的社会认知：轻度认知障碍中情感和认知理论的不同演变。

维持诸如心理理论（ToM）能力之类的社交技能对于抵制轻度认知障碍（MCI）中痴呆症的转化非常重要。多维非药物干预措施证明了其在改善认知和行为能力方面的潜力。然而，对于这种干预对MCI患者社交技能的长期影响知之甚少。这项纵向研究的目的是在参与家庭多刺激治疗（MST @ H）的记忆删除MCI（aMCI）样本中，同时考虑认知和情感领域来监测ToM能力。30个aMCI主题（; ），并进行了三个阶段的神经心理学测试和ToM任务评估。还包括21个健康对照（HC）（; ）来表征aMCI样本，以评估在基线评估时与HC相比较的ToM性能差异。我们的结果表明，仅在高级ToM任务中，aMCI组在统计学上明显不如HC组，这证实了该人群中高水平ToM能力的最初下降。纵向评估显示，时间的变化不仅在MoCA的某些亚认知领域（记忆和执行功能），而且在aMCI受试者的认知和情感ToM维度上都发生了变化。我们的发现表明，认知和情感上的ToM可以被认为是测试治疗随时间推移的长期效果的有用结果指标。