Social capabilities in Alzheimer’s patients

Antoni Bosch-Domènech, Rosemarie Nagel and Juan Vicente Sánchez-Andrés

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: Patients with stage-I (very mild and mild) Alzheimer’s disease were asked to participate in a Dictator Game, a type of game in which a subject has to decide how to allocate a certain amount of money between himself and another person. The game enables the experimenter to examine the influence of social norms and social preferences on the decision-making process. When the results of treatments involving Alzheimer’s disease patients were compared with those of identical treatments involving patients with mild cognitive impairment or healthy control subjects, with similar ages and social backgrounds, no statistically significant difference was found. This finding suggests that stage-I Alzheimer’s disease patients may be as capable of making decisions involving social norms and preferences as other individuals of their age. Whatever brain structures are affected by the disease, they do not appear to influence, at this early stage, the neural basis for cooperation-enhancing social interactions.

Keywords: Alzheimer patients; social behavior; dictator games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 C9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hea and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1020.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).