社会认知与同感现象学

社会认知主要围绕"理论理论"与"模仿理论"两个经典模型来解释人际间的理解。这一主流框架既包含重要的洞见,也隐含着成问题的理论预设。同感现象学及其当代的代表"直接感知理论"对上述框架提出挑战,认为他人认知的起点不是认知者的理论推理或者心智模仿,应该回溯到认知者初始的感知经验,认为感知是通达关于他人心智生活的一种不可或缺的方式。     

Empathy,Embodiment, and the Unity of Expression

This paper presents an account of empathy as the form of experience directed at embodied unities of expressive movement. After outlining the key differences between simulation theory and the phenomenological approach to empathy, the paper argues that while the phenomenological approach is closer to respecting a necessary constitutional asymmetry between first-personal and second-personal senses of embodiment, it still presupposes a general concept of embodiment that ends up being problematic. A different account is proposed that is neutral on the explanatory role of the first-person sense of embodiment, which leads to an emphasis on the transformative nature of empathy and a broadening of the scope of possible targets of empathic awareness.     

同感、具身和人际理解:从里普斯到舒茨

谈到理解社会认知的本质,我们似乎只能在模仿理论、理论-理论或者二者的一些混合物之间选择。然而,作者在文中提出,现象学传统提供了有别于以上三者的第四个选项。首先,作者讨论了里普斯(Lipps)有关同感的阐释。接着,作者分析了舍勒、施坦(Stein)和胡塞尔批评里普斯的方式,勾勒了他们各自方案的核心特征。接下来,作者考察了舒茨(Schutz)如何承继并修改了上述三人对同感和社会认知的基本看法。最后,在结论中作者反驳了一种针对现象学方案的异议,进一步说明了现象学方案的可行性。     

Embodiment: An Introduction

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

作为政治实践的“同情”:同情、审议民主与社会结构

在关于审议民主的讨论中,情感被认为:有损于认知,影响人们的判断;是主观的、个体的,难以形成普遍性的道德规范;会阻碍共识的达成。但关于情感的新的理解,为我们重新看待情感在政治生活中的意义提供了契机。本文关注的是同情在审议民主中的意义,在现有研究的基础上,将同情视为一个过程和一种实践,而不仅仅是一种心理机制。同情能够影响个体的判断,是健全理性的必要构成部分。情感有助于"角色承担",形成普遍化的立场和规范。同情也为我们重新设想"多元公众"提供了视角。但不平等的社会结构、距离、心理机制等因素都有可能阻碍同情的发生。"他者"的问题是政治实践所处理的重要议题。随着"他者"问题的凸显,作为政治实践的同情在未来的政治生活中将会扮演更为重要的角色。     

Introduction: Social Cognition, Psychodynamic Psychology, and the Representation and Processing of Emotionally Significant Information

ABSTRACT This special issue examines two perspectives on how people comprehend and respond to significant features of their lives: psychoanalytic psychology and social cognition. The articles included present new empirical findings relevant to die overlap of psychoanalysis and social-cognitive psychology, as well as commentaries from each perspective. This introduction summarizes important conceptual and methodological challenges in the integration of two such distinct approaches to emotionally significant information.     

Comparison of Cognitive Empathy,Emotional Empathy,and Social Functioning in Different Age Groups

Empathic responses and optimum social functioning are associated with psychological and physical health benefits. The aim of this study was to compare emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, and social functioning among different age groups, including adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adulthood. One hundred and ninety‐six people (92 males, 104 females) with the age range of 14 to 85 assigned to four age groups (adolescents, young adults, middle adults, and older adults) participated in this study. Participants were asked to complete the Empathy Quotient, the Revised Eyes Test, and Social Functioning Scale. The results showed that there were significant differences between older adults and other groups. Emotional empathy increased in older people, but there were deficits in some aspects of cognitive empathy. Also, the findings showed an age‐related decline in social functioning. Due to deficits in cognitive empathy affected by ageing, older adults showed some impairment in their ability to interpret emotional cues. This age‐related decline in cognitive empathy might be a reason for weak social functioning in older adults. Therefore, considering these elements would be helpful to provide healthcare strategies for elderly people.     

Social Cognition,Accuracy, and Physiology

Existing norms for scientific communication are rooted in anachronistic practices of bygone eras making them needlessly inefficient. We outline a path that moves away from the existing model of scientific communication to improve the efficiency in meeting the purpose of public science—knowledge accumulation. We call for six changes: (a) full embrace of digital communication; (b) open access to all published research; (c) disentangling publication from evaluation; (d) breaking the “one article, one journal” model with a grading system for evaluation and diversified dissemination outlets; (e) publishing peer review; and (f) allowing open, continuous peer review. We address conceptual and practical barriers to change and provide examples showing how the suggested practices are being used already. The critical barriers to change are not technical or financial; they are social. Although scientists guard the status quo, they also have the power to change it.     

Empathy: A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

There has been recent widespread interest in the neural underpinnings of the experience of empathy. In this review, we take a social cognitive neuroscience approach to understanding the existing literature on the neuroscience of empathy. A growing body of work suggests that we come to understand and share in the experiences of others by commonly recruiting the same neural structures both during our own experience and while observing others undergoing the same experience. This literature supports a simulation theory of empathy, which proposes that we understand the thoughts and feelings of others by using our own mind as a model. In contrast, theory of mind research suggests that medial prefrontal regions are critical for understanding the minds of others. In this review, we offer ideas about how to integrate these two perspectives, point out unresolved issues in the literature, and suggest avenues for future research.     

The Arrow of Time and the Cycle of Time: Concepts of Change,Cognition, and Embodiment

In this target article, I explore the thesis that both the natural and human sciences are undergoing—however gradually and reluctantly—a deep and broad paradigm shift. This shift is away from foundational, objectivist, atomist, nondirectional mechanistic category systems and toward interpretational, holistic, relational-dialectical, directional organic category systems. The contextual influence of each of these category systems on understandings of change (development), cognition, and personality is examined both historically and from a contemporary perspective across a wide band of scientific disciplines. The Arrow of Time is a deep metaphor entailing a relational field of both nonclosed cycles (spirals) and direction. The Arrow of Time metaphor emerges from the organic narrative. Within the context of this metaphor, and the broader organic metaphor that forms the wider conceptual context, development is understood as entailing both direction and variation. Within the organic metaphor, cognition and personality are understood as emerging from a fundamentally relational theory of the embodied mind. The Cycle of Time is a deep metaphor of closed cycles that reduce apparent directionality to nothing but variation. The Cycle of Time emerges from the mechanical narrative. Here development is understood as being limited to variation and only variation, and cognition and personality emerge from a theory of the computational mind. Theoretical and methodological implications of each of these broad contextual narratives are discussed.     

Attention, Joint Attention, and Social Cognition

ABSTRACT— Before social cognition there is joint processing of information about the attention of self and others. This joint attention requires the integrated activation of a distributed cortical network involving the anterior and posterior attention systems. In infancy, practice with the integrated activation of this distributed attention network is a major contributor to the development of social cognition. Thus, the functional neuroanatomies of social cognition and the anterior–posterior attention systems have much in common. These propositions have implications for understanding joint attention, social cognition, and autism.     

镜像神经元:认知具身性的神经生物学证据

传统认知心理学认为认知类似于计算机对抽象符号的加工和运算,这种观点支持了身心二元论。但是近年来兴起的具身认知运动却否定了这一观点的合理性。具身认知认为认知是身体与世界互动的结果,是身体的感觉-运动系统作用于世界而塑造出来的。认知是具身的,离不开身体的构造和感觉运动系统的作用。镜像神经元的发现支持了认知的具身特征,为认知的具身性提供了神经生物学的证据。     

Logic and Social Cognition

This article takes off from Johan van Benthem’s ruminations on the interface between logic and cognitive science in his position paper “Logic and reasoning: Do the facts matter?”. When trying to answer Van Benthem’s question whether logic can be fruitfully combined with psychological experiments, this article focuses on a specific domain of reasoning, namely higher-order social cognition, including attributions such as “Bob knows that Alice knows that he wrote a novel under pseudonym”. For intelligent interaction, it is important that the participants recursively model the mental states of other agents. Otherwise, an international negotiation may fail, even when it has potential for a win-win solution, and in a time-critical rescue mission, a software agent may depend on a teammate’s action that never materializes. First a survey is presented of past and current research on higher-order social cognition, from the various viewpoints of logic, artificial intelligence, and psychology. Do people actually reason about each other’s knowledge in the way proscribed by epistemic logic? And if not, how can logic and cognitive science productively work together to construct more realistic models of human reasoning about other minds? The paper ends with a delineation of possible avenues for future research, aiming to provide a better understanding of higher-order social reasoning. The methodology is based on a combination of experimental research, logic, computational cognitive models, and agent-based evolutionary models.     

Socialization: Insights from Social Cognition

Socialization is the process by which individuals are assisted to become members of their social groups. Findings from social cognition and cross-cultural psychology offer two major insights into the socialization process. First, basic social cognitive principles imply that the immediate environment functions as a socialization agent by activating and inhibiting knowledge structures and thereby shaping cognition and behavior. Second, because the immediate environment factors into cognition and behavior, socialization efforts should involve the modification of the environment for optimal effect. We discuss various examples of socialization through the configuration of the immediate environment, such as rituals and use of physical artifacts. Our review links basic social cognitive mechanisms to socialization processes, which are customarily treated at higher levels of analysis.     

Phenomenology and Critical Social Psychology: Directions and Debates in Theory and Research

There has been significant growth in critical approaches to social psychology in recent years. Phenomenological, discursive and psychoanalytically informed perspectives, amongst others, have become increasingly popular alternatives to ‘mainstream’ cognitive social psychology. This paper describes the fundamental philosophy and methodology underpinning phenomenological psychology along with discussion of a number of key issues in qualitative research in social psychology. In particular, I discuss the role of interpretation, the turn to language and need for political engagement within critical social psychology. More recently, there has been a growth in phenomenologically informed narrative theories and methodologies and in this paper I introduce my own development of a critical narrative analysis. In the process I discuss some of the most pressing debates about research within the phenomenological tradition and provide rebuttals, solutions and possible future directions for phenomenological theory and research that may lead to yet greater recognition for this social psychological perspective.