Abstracts Psychology

Testing the diagnostic utility of the construct and measurement of social cognition across acquired and degenerative neurological conditions

by Madeleine Hurd

The portfolio has three parts. Part one is a systematic literature review, in which literature relating to the sensitivity and specificity of neuropsychological measures in identifying behavioural variant Frontotemporal Dementia is reviewed. Neuropsychological measures from the following cognitive domains are reviewed: executive functioning, social cognition, episodic memory, selfreport measures and praxis ability. Part two is an empir ical paper, which explores the relationship between emotion recognition and general intellectual abilities in a population with an acquired brain injury and healthy controls. There is large debate in the literature about whether emotion recognition is a mo dular ability, or reliant on general intellectual abilities; this paper seeks to clarify this. Part three comprises the appendices, including a reflective and epistemological statement.