Validation de la mini-SEA dans une population française variée : données de référence pour la pratique clinique

Social cognition, referring to humans’ abilities to process social information in order to efficiently interact with each other, is impaired in a wide range of clinical groups. Among them, patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal lobar degeneration (bvFTD) have been found to present deficits in emotion recognition and mental state inference. Based on these components of social cognition, the mini-SEA battery was developed a dozen years ago and is widely used today with patients suffering from a variety of conditions. However, national normative studies are still lacking. The aim of the present study is to provide such normative reference data for French participants and to evaluate the psychometric qualities of the mini-SEA. 150 healthy participants were assessed with the mini-SEA. We found that performance decreased with the age of participants, and we observed a general, though small, advantage for women participants. Sensitivity analyses revealed that both sub-tests are relatively easy for healthy participants. However, emotion recognition performance appeared to depend on the type of emotions displayed. Internal consistency and reliability both appeared to be satisfactory, although these dimensions should be investigated in greater depth in future studies. Finally, the mini-SEA showed good clinical validity, as reflected by excellent specificity and sensitivity values.