Social and Moral Cognition in Multiple Sclerosis

Summary

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, progressive disease that affects young adults (aged between 20 and 40) and has a major impact on patients' quality of life. Cognitive disorders in MS are common, affecting 40-60% of patients. Among these disorders, the presence of social cognition disorders is common. Within social cognition, the moral judgment has been an object of research in order to understand the determinants of moral decision-making: how and why individuals make moral choices with regard to a set of prescriptions and social norms. Compared to control subjects, MS patients show a decrease in moral permissiveness, as well as an increase in moral relativity and emotional reactivity. Thus, it would seem that MS patients issue more deontological choices (lower moral permissiveness). Given that these patients also exhibit empathy deficits and higher alexithymia, these patterns are surprising. Indeed, in other clinical populations, low empathic abilities and high alexithymia are linked to utilitarian rather than deontological moral judgments.

The objective of this project is to analyze the process of decision-making carried out by patients during moral dilemma situations in comparison with control individuals and verify whether the presence of a positivity bias could explain the more deontological choices made by some patients. Indeed, some work has shown that older individuals make more deontological moral judgments than younger adults. These results are also observed with young individuals when their future temporal perspectives have been experimentally constrained.

Conditions

• Multiple Sclerosis

Interventions

OTHER

Socio-demographic questionnaire, moral judgment task, cognitive tests, psychoaffective assessment

The demographic questionnaire collects demographic information: gender, age, level of education, laterality, history of psychiatric or neurological disorders. The moral judgment task consists in completing 20 vignettes of moral dilemmas. Cognitive disorders will be assessed using the Brief International Cognitive Assessment for Multiple Sclerosis (BICAMS) battery. If the patient has taken the BICAMS battery recently (less than 6 months), and with no change in pathology since then, the results of these tests will be used in this study. Affective disorders will be assessed using the following tests: * The Beck Depression Inventory-Fast Screen (BDI-FS) to assess the level of depression, * State trait anxiety inventory-Y (STAI-Y) to assess anxiety, * Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20)to assess alexithymia, * The Empathy Quotient-8 (EQ-8) to assess participants' level of empathy, * The Dot Probe Task to assess participants' emotional information processing style.

OTHER

MS questionnaire

This questionnaire collects key information on the participant's pathology: clinical form, date of first symptoms, diagnosis, last attack, as well as latest EDSS and functional scores.

OTHER

MONTREAL COGNITIVE ASSESSMENT (MoCA) test

The MoCA is a screening tool for neurocognitive impairment, designed primarily to detect milder impairment. The MoCA is a short-answer questionnaire that includes a number of tasks to be completed by the individual. The items assessed are grouped into six subsections: short-term memory, visuospatial skills, executive functions, attention, concentration, working memory, language and orientation in time and space. The tests proposed are often more complex than those found in the mini-mental state examination (MMSE).

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Lille Catholic University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Béatrice DEGRAEVE · Catholic University of Lille Faculty of Letters and Humanities

Study Design

Allocation

NON_RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

55 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2023-12-19

Primary Completion

2025-04-30

Completion

2025-10-30

Countries

• France

Study Locations