Psychometric properties of the Dutch version of the social interaction vocabulary task

Social functioning is affected in various ways in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), and having tests available to assess aspects of social functioning increases the accuracy of diagnostic evaluation. One such aspect is having an accurate semantic representation of socio-emotional concepts. We designed a clinical test, the social interaction vocabulary task (SIVT), to capture this aspect. It requires participants to select a photo from a set of distractor photos that depicts a social interaction term most accurately, for example, the term "consoling." We showed in an earlier study that bvFTD patients perform below threshold on the SIVT, and that brain regions associated with poor test performance overlapped with regions typically affected in bvFTD patients. The objective of the current study is to examine the psychometric properties of a Dutch translation of the SIVT.

We translated the SIVT into Dutch using a forward and back-translation model and examined the psychometric properties of this translation. We also generated Dutch norms using a sample of 14 patients with bvFTD, 47 presymptomatic mutation carriers, and 53 healthy controls and compared performance with other nonsocial function tests.

We found that the Dutch translation discriminates well between bvFTD patients and healthy controls but does not discriminate between non-symptomatic individuals. Additionally, moderate to high correlation with emotion recognition and semantic language tests was found, and weak correlation with executive functioning tests.

These results indicate that the Dutch translation of the SIVT discriminates well between bvFTD patients and non-symptomatic individuals. In combination with tools that are already available, this test can help clinical practitioners in the Netherlands to create a comprehensive picture of a patient's overall social functioning.