Sandra Baez

Los Andes University (Colombia) | UNIANDES · Department of Psychology

Structural inequality, the uneven distribution of resources and opportunities, influences health outcomes. However, the biological embedding of structural inequality in aging and dementia, especially among underrepresented populations, is unclear. We examined the association between structural inequality (country-level and state-level Gini indices)...

Background Structural income inequality – the uneven income distribution across regions or countries – could affect brain structure and function, beyond individual differences. However, the impact of structural income inequality on the brain dynamics and the roles of demographics and cognition in these associations remains unexplored. Methods Here...

Brain clocks, which quantify discrepancies between brain age and chronological age, hold promise for understanding brain health and disease. However, the impact of diversity (including geographical, socioeconomic, sociodemographic, sex and neurodegeneration) on the brain-age gap is unknown. We analyzed datasets from 5,306 participants across 15 cou...

BACKGROUND Education influences brain health and dementia. However, its impact across regions, specifically Latin America (LA) and the United States (US), is unknown. METHODS A total of 1412 participants comprising controls, patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) from LA and the US were included. We st...

While social communication and interaction deficits are inherent in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the evidence regarding difficulties in basic and moral emotion recognition remains inconclusive. Previous research has predominantly focused on the recognition of basic emotions, using stimuli that lack context and overlooking the influence of alexit...

Models of healthy aging are typically based on the United States and Europe and may not apply to diverse and heterogeneous populations. In this study, our objectives were to conduct a meta-analysis to assess risk factors of cognition and functional ability across aging populations in Latin America and a scoping review focusing on methodological pro...

Dementia is a syndrome characterized by cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms associated with progressive functional decline (FD). FD is a core diagnostic criterion for dementia, setting the threshold between its prodromal stages and the full-blown disease. The operationalization of FD continues to generate a great deal of controversy. For instan...

Growing up in neglectful households can impact multiple aspects of social cognition. However, research on neglect's effects on social cognition processes and their neuroanatomical correlates during adolescence is scarce. Here, we aimed to comprehensively assess social cognition processes (recognition of basic and contextual emotions, theory of mind...

Anxiety disorders are the most prevalent psychological conditions among adults worldwide. However, further research is needed on the role of variables such as health indices, stressful events, social cognition, and executive functioning in predicting anxiety symptoms. We conducted two studies to explore the association between these variables and a...

Brain clocks, which quantify discrepancies between brain age and chronological age, hold promise for understanding brain health and disease. However, the impact of multimodal diversity (geographical, socioeconomic, sociodemographic, sex, neurodegeneration) on the brain age gap (BAG) is unknown. Here, we analyzed datasets from 5,306 participants acr...

Objective There are several anxiety disorders leading to a high burden of disease around the world, including Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). The heritability of GAD suggests that genetic factors play an important role in its development; however, further research in this area is needed in Latin America. This study aimed to analyze the possible...

Over the last decades, theoretical perspectives in the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences have proliferated rather than converged due to differing assumptions about what human affective phenomena are and how they work. These metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions, shaped by academic context and values, have dictated affective const...

Women's contributions to science have been consistently underrepresented throughout history. Despite many efforts and some progresses being made to reduce gender inequity in science, pursuing an academic career across disciplines, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other dementias, remains challenging for women. Idiosyncratic difficulties of La...

Social cognition impairments may be associated with poor functional outcomes, symptoms, and disability in social anxiety disorder (SAD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). This meta-analysis aims to determine if emotion recognition and theory of mind (ToM) are impaired in SAD or GAD compared to healthy controls. A systematic review was conducte...

Although social functioning relies on working memory, whether a social-specific mechanism exists remains unclear. This undermines the characterization of neurodegenerative conditions with both working memory and social deficits. We assessed working memory domain-specificity across behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging dimensions in 245...

Background The triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cell 2 (TREM2) is a major regulator of neuroinflammatory processes in neurodegeneration. To date, the p.H157Y variant of TREM2 has been reported only in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Here, we report three patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) from three unrelated families with heter...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present difficulties in integrating mental state information in complex moral tasks. Yet, ASD research has not examined whether this process is influenced by emotions, let alone while capturing its neural bases. We investigated how language-induced emotions modulate intent-based moral judgment in ASD....

Background: Although social cognition is compromised in patients with neurodegenerative disorders such as behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), research on moral emotions and their neural correlates in these populations is scarce. No previous study has explored the utility of moral emotions, compared to a...

Social emotions are critical to successfully navigate in a complex social world because they promote self-regulation of behavior. Difficulties in social behavior are at the core of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, social emotions and their neural correlates have been scarcely investigated in this population. In particular, the experience of...

Background The high prevalence of female breast cancer is a global health concern. Breast cancer and its treatments have been associated with impairments in general cognition, as well as structural and functional brain changes. Considering the social challenges that some of these patients face, it is important to understand the socio-emotional effe...

Background Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) has been related to different genetic factors. Identifying multimodal phenotypic heterogeneity triggered by various genetic influences is critical for improving diagnosis, prognosis, and treatments. However, the specific impact of different genetic levels (mutations vs. risk variants vs....

Purpose Following a case–control design, as a primary objective, this study aimed to explore the relationship between quality of life (QoL) scores and gray matter (GM) volumes in patients with Huntington’s disease (HD). As a secondary objective, we assessed the relationship between QoL scores and other important behavioral, clinical and demographic...

Measures of social cognition have now become central in neuropsychology, being essential for early and differential diagnoses, follow-up, and rehabilitation in a wide range of conditions. With the scientific world becoming increasingly interconnected, international neuropsychological and medical collaborations are burgeoning to tackle the global ch...

We present here a unifying framework for affective phenomena: the Human Affectome. By synthesizing a large body of literature, we have converged on definitions that disambiguate the commonly used terms—affect, feeling, emotion, and mood. Based on this definitional foundation, and under the premise that affective states reflect allostatic concerns,...

Measures of social cognition have now become central in neuropsychology, being essential for early and differential diagnoses, follow-up and rehabilitation in a wide range of conditions. With the scientific world becoming increasingly interconnected, international neuropsychological and medical collaborations are burgeoning to tackle the global cha...

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is the third most common form of dementia across all age groups and is a leading cause of early-onset dementia. The Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) includes a spectrum of diseases that are classified according to their clinical presentation and patterns of neurodegeneration. There are two main types of FTD: behavioral FT...

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has imposed widespread negative impacts (economically, psychologically, neurologically, and societally), and has changed daily behaviors on a global scale. Such impacts are more significant and pervasive in countries with higher levels of inequality and reduced Government capacity and responsiveness, such as those in the Glo...

Background Social cognition impairments have been extensively described in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Moral emotions have recently emerged as a potentially sensitive domain to characterize and discriminate bvFTD patients from other types of dementia. Here, we examined the usefulness of moral emotions measures...

Achieving justice could be considered a complex social decision-making scenario. Despite the relevance of social decisions for legal contexts, these processes have still not been explored for individuals who work as criminal judges dispensing justice. To bridge the gap, we used a complex social decision-making task (Ultimatum game) and tracked a he...

Background: Social cognition is critically compromised across neurodegenerative diseases, including the behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), Alzheimer's disease (AD), and Parkinson's disease (PD). However, no previous study has used social cognition and other cognitive tasks to predict diagnoses of these conditions, let alone report...

Social emotions require the correct integration of emotional, cognitive, and social processes and are critical for complex social interactions. Adolescent criminal offenders (AOs) show abnormalities in the experience of basic emotions. However, most research has focused solely on basic emotions, neglecting complex social emotions that could be crit...

Reduced empathic abilities are frequently observed in drug abusers. These deficits may compromise interpersonal interactions and contribute to diminished social functioning. However, previous evidence regarding empathy and addiction is behaviorally unspecific and virtually null in terms of their brain structural or functional correlates. Moreover,...

Across Latin American and Caribbean countries (LACs), the fight against dementia faces pressing challenges, such as heterogeneity, diversity, political instability, and socioeconomic disparities. These can be addressed more effectively in a collaborative setting that fosters open exchange of knowledge. In this work, the Latin American and Caribbean...

The identification of human violence determinants has sparked multiple questions from different academic fields. Innovative methodological assessments of the weight and interaction of multiple determinants are still required. Here, we examine multiple features potentially associated with confessed acts of violence in ex-members of illegal armed gro...

Strong group identities arise in intergroup conflict scenarios and perpetuate sectarian violence even in post-conflict scenarios. In particular, out-group negative implicit associations are predictors of decreased intergroup forgiveness, as well as increased distrust and aggression against the out-group. Thus, the presence of implicit intergroup (i...

Background Decades of researches aiming to unveil truths about human neuropsychology may have instead unveil facts appropriate to only a fraction of the world’s population: those living in western educated rich democratic nations (Muthukrishna et al., 2020 Psych Sci). So far, most studies were conducted as if education and cultural assumptions on w...

Frontostriatal disorders, such as Parkinson's disease (PD), are characterized by progressive disruption of cortico-subcortical dopaminergic loops involved in diverse higher-order domains, including language. Indeed, syntactic and emotional language tasks have emerged as potential biomarkers of frontostriatal disturbances. However, relevant studies...

Traditional and mainstream legal frameworks conceive law primarily as a purely rational practice, free from affect or intuition. However, substantial evidence indicates that human decision-making depends upon diverse biases. We explored the manifestation of these biases through comparisons among 45 criminal judges, 60 criminal attorneys, and 64 con...

Humans have developed specific abilities to interact efficiently with their conspecifics (social cognition). Despite abundant behavioral and neuroscientific research, the influence of cultural factors on these skills remains poorly understood. This issue is of particular importance as most cognitive tasks are developed in highly specific contexts,...

Comparisons between backward and forward translation (BT, FT) have long illuminated the organization of bilingual memory, with neuroscientific evidence indicating that FT would involve greater linguistic and atten-tional demands. However, no study has directly assessed the functional interaction between relevant mechanisms. Against this background,...

Social factors, such as social cognition skills (SCS) and social determinants of health (SDH), may be vital for mental health, even when compared with classical psycho-physical predictors (demographic, physical, psychiatric, and cognitive factors). Although major risk factors for psychiatric disorders have been previously assessed, the relative wei...

Pregnancy and puerperium are typified by marked biobehavioral changes. These changes, which are traceable in both mothers and fathers, play an important role in parenthood and may modulate social cognition abilities. However, the latter effects remain notably unexplored in parents of newborns (PNs). To bridge this gap, we assessed empathy and socia...

Sadness is characterized by raised inner eyebrows, lowered corners of the mouth, reduced walking speed and slumped posture. Ancient subcortical circuitry provides a neuroanatomical foundation, extending from dorsal periaqueductal grey to subgenual anterior cingulate, the latter of which is now a treatment target in disorders of sadness. Sadness is...

Social factors, such as social cognition skills (SCS) and social determinants of health (SDH), may be vital for mental health, even when compared with classical psycho-physical predictors (demographic, physical, psychiatric, and cognitive factors). Although major risk factors for psychiatric disorders have been previously assessed, the relative wei...

Many neurological and psychiatric disorders involve the frontal lobes either directly or through frontal-subcortical connections. In this chapter, we review the specific structural and functional frontal and/or frontal-subcortical abnormalities observed in these disorders and their associations to clinical and cognitive symptoms. First, we briefly...

This chapter focuses on the main degenerative diseases that affect the frontal lobes either directly or through frontostriatal connections. We review the specific structural and functional frontal and/or frontostriatal abnormalities observed in these disorders and describe their associations to clinical, behavioral and cognitive symptoms. First, we...

Introduction: The volume of the striatal structures has been associated with disease progression in individuals with Huntington's disease (HD) from North America, Europe, and Australia. However, it is not known whether the gray matter (GM) volume in the striatum is also sensitive in differentiating vulnerability from disease manifestation in HD fa...

Although primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is clinically typified by linguistic impairments, emerging evidence highlights the presence of early deficits in social cognition. This review systematically describes the latter patterns, specifying their relation to the characteristic linguistic dysfunctions and atrophy patterns of non-fluent, semantic,...

Background: Adolescent offenders (AOs) are characterized by social-norm transgression and aggressive behaviors. Those traits have been associated with alterations in socio-cognitive processes, including facial emotion recognition. While this would suggest that AOs tend to interpret negative emotional cues as threatening information, most research h...

Collective violence in the context of armed conflict impacts the economy, health systems, and social stability of affected countries. This is considered a complex phenomenon with interwoven biological, psychological, social, cultural, and political factors. However, most of the research on this topic still lacks suitable established integrative app...

Social deprivation, as faced by children in institutional rearing, involves socio-cognitive deficits that may persist into adolescence. In particular, two relevant domains which prove sensitive to pre-adult neurodevelopment are theory of mind (ToM) and moral judgment (a complex skill which partially depend upon ToM). However, no study has assessed...

When we interact with others, the context in which our actions take place plays a major role in our behavior. This means that our understanding of objects, words, emotions, and social cues may differ depending on where we encounter them. Here, we explain how context affects daily mental processes, ranging from how people see things to how they beha...

Higher levels of oxytocin are associated with better performance on social cognition tasks. However, higher levels of oxytocin have also been associated with increased levels of envy and schadenfreude. Considering these antecedents, this study aims to explore social emotions (i.e., envy and schadenfreude) and other components of social cognition (i...

Moral cognition, a central aspect of human social functioning, involves complex interactions between emotion and reasoning to tell right from wrong. In this chapter, we summarize the cognitive neuroscience literature on moral cognition and moral emotions, highlighting their close relationship with other social cognition domains. We consider neuroim...