Empathic Accuracy in Adolescent Girls with Turner Syndrome

To examine the potential mechanisms underlying social deficits in Turner Syndrome, we administered the empathic accuracy task (EAT) -a naturalistic social cognition task- and a (control) visual-motor line-tracking task to 14 girls with TS was compared to 12 age-matched typically developing girls (TD; ages 12 to 17). Empathic accuracy was compared across positive and negative emotionally valanced videos. We found that TS differs from TD on empathic accuracy ratings for negative videos; no differences were detected for the positive videos or for the control line tracking task. Thus, our findings suggest impaired detection of negatively valanced empathic interactions in TS and may help inform the future development of social-cognition treatment strategies for girls with TS.

Automated summary

By studying empathic accuracy and control tasks in girls with Turner Syndrome, it was found that they showed differences in empathic accuracy ratings for negative emotional videos, but not for positive videos or control tasks. These findings suggest impaired detection of negatively valanced empathic interactions in girls with Turner Syndrome.