The Relationship between Social Cognition and Quality of Life in women with Multiple Sclerosis

The Quality of Life decreases in chronic debilitating diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, and interactions in the desired range of Social Cognition have beneficial effects in increasing the quality of life of patients. The purpose was to investigate the relationship between social cognition and quality of life in affected women.

A descriptive-analytical study of the correlation type with multiple regression analysis, in which 470 women with MS were selected from patients who were members of the Iranian MS Association in 1401 by the available sampling method, and were asked specific quality of life questionnaires for MS patients. MSIS-29 and Emotion Recognition Task (Social Cognition) responded.

The average age was 38.79 ± 8.91 years old and the most common type of disease was relapsing-remitting MS (49.4%). The quality of life (Average score) was between 58 and 87. To predict the quality of life using social cognition in the last step of multiple regression, the coefficient of determination was 0.407. People who recognized the emotions of fear, anger, disgust, surprise and sadness better had a higher quality of life. There was no significant relationship between happiness and quality of life. The components of surprise, sadness, disgust and fear purely explained 40% of the changes in the quality of life.

Increasing social cognition in recognizing the main facial emotions increases the quality of life of people with MS.