BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Health Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1607552
This article is part of the Research TopicIntegrating Health Psychology in Practice: Enhancing Well-being and Improving Health Outcomes Across Diverse ContextsView all 23 articles
Comparing the benefits of Cognitive Stimulation Therapy with an adapted collaborative version on traditional outcomes, loneliness, and socioemotional skills: a pilot study
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Padua, Padua, Italy
- 2University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Urbino, Marche, Italy
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Background: Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) is among the psychosocial interventions with strongest evidence of efficacy for the treatment of dementia. It has been argued that people with dementia (PwD) can also benefit from collaboration and teamwork with peers. This pilot study aimed to evaluate the benefits of a new Collaborative CST (C-CST) protocol, vis-à-vis the Standard CST (S-CST), on traditional and underexplored, psychosocial and socio-emotional outcomes. Methods: Twenty-eight PwD (mean age: 87±5.74) from six Italian residential facilities were randomly allocated to either S-CST or C-CST. Benefits were examined in traditional outcomes, i.e., global cognitive functioning, mood, psychological and behavioral symptoms, as well as overlooked psychosocial outcomes, i.e. social and emotional loneliness, and socio-emotional skills, i.e., cognitive and affective Theory of Mind (ToM) and definitional competence of emotions. Results: Results indicated that both C-CST and S-CST maintained mood, but only S-CST supported global cognitive functioning and mitigated psychological and behavioral symptoms at post-intervention. Both CST protocols also reduced social loneliness (but not emotional loneliness) and ameliorated definitional competence of emotions at post-intervention, with C-CST showing larger effect sizes compared to S-CST. Only S-CST fostered cognitive ToM (but not affective one) at post-intervention. Conclusion: Different CST protocols provided nuanced benefits across traditional, psychosocial, and socioemotional outcomes. S-CST remains the only protocol capable of promoting benefits in cognition and key dementia-related symptoms, while the new C-CST emerges as a promising and easily implementable protocol with the potential to alleviate loneliness and support some socio-emotional skills in PwD.
Keywords: cognitive stimulation therapy, Collaboratory activities, Dementia, Loneliness, Theory of Mind, Definitional Competence of emotions
Received: 07 Apr 2025; Accepted: 20 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Domenicucci, Carbone, Sella, Belacchi, Sarlo and Borella. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Riccardo Domenicucci, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.