The developmental approach to young children's strategic social cognition and behaviour

This study explores the development of strategic behaviour related to kindness and intelligence dimensions in 3‐ to 8‐year‐old children. Previous research systematically highlighted the affective bias that limited young children's thinking and behaving in strategic terms. We argue that young children are able to grasp specific dimensions of social affordances from personality traits and behaviour exemplifying these traits. The results obtained in the partner choice paradigm revealed a developmental increase in social utility understanding. This supports our hypothesis of early social affordances understanding and provides empirical evidence that affective bias did not drastically influence strategic partner choice in 4‐ to 8‐year‐old children. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mutual gaze and social cognition

I examine the role of mutual gaze in social cognition. I start by discussing recent studies of joint visual attention in order to show that social cognition is operative in infancy prior to the emergence of theoretical skills required to make judgments about other people's states of mind. Such social cognition depends on the communicative potential inherent in human bodies. I proceed to examine this embodied social cognition in the context of Merleau-Ponty's views on vision. I expose some inner difficulties within Merleau-Ponty's position as well as to point out the ways of resolving them by means of combined insights from developmental psychology and the analyses of self-other relations from philosophies of dialogue.     

Empathy and contextual social cognition

Empathy is a highly flexible and adaptive process that allows for the interplay of prosocial behavior in many different social contexts. Empathy appears to be a very situated cognitive process, embedded with specific contextual cues that trigger different automatic and controlled responses. In this review, we summarize relevant evidence regarding social context modulation of empathy for pain. Several contextual factors, such as stimulus reality and personal experience, affectively link with other factors, emotional cues, threat information, group membership, and attitudes toward others to influence the affective, sensorimotor, and cognitive processing of empathy. Thus, we propose that the frontoinsular-temporal network, the so-called social context network model (SCNM), is recruited during the contextual processing of empathy. This network would (1) update the contextual cues and use them to construct fast predictions (frontal regions), (2) coordinate the internal (body) and external milieus (insula), and (3) consolidate the context–target associative learning of empathic processes (temporal sites). Furthermore, we propose these context-dependent effects of empathy in the framework of the frontoinsular-temporal network and examine the behavioral and neural evidence of three neuropsychiatric conditions (Asperger syndrome, schizophrenia, and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia), which simultaneously present with empathy and contextual integration impairments. We suggest potential advantages of a situated approach to empathy in the assessment of these neuropsychiatric disorders, as well as their relationship with the SCNM.     

Emotional intelligence and social perception

One of the key facets of emotional intelligence (EI) is the capacity of an individual to recognise emotions in others. However, this has not been tested cross-culturally, despite the body of research indicating that people are better at recognising facial affect of members of their own culture. Given the emotion recognition aspect of EI, it would seem that EI should be related to correctly identifying emotion in others regardless of race. In order to test this, a social perception inspection time task was carried out in which participants (41 Caucasian and 46 Far-East Asian) were required to identify the emotion on Caucasian and Far-East Asian faces that were happy, sad, or angry. Results from this study indicate that EI was not related to correctly identifying facial expressions. The results did confirm that participants are better able to recognise people of their own ethnicity, though this was only applicable to negative emotions.     

Reuniting physical and social cognition in development

Book discussed in this article: Cintia Rodríguez, The magic number three: when infants do not yet speak     

Emotional intelligence and social interaction

Two studies found positive relationships between the ability to manage emotions and the quality of social interactions, supporting the predictive and incremental validity of an ability measure of emotional intelligence, the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). In a sample of 118 American college students (Study 1), higher scores on the managing emotions subscale of the MSCEIT were positively related to the quality of interactions with friends, evaluated separately by participants and two friends. In a diary study of social interaction with 103 German college students (Study 2), managing emotions scores were positively related to the perceived quality of interactions with opposite sex individuals. Scores on this subscale were also positively related to perceived success in impression management in social interactions with individuals of the opposite sex. In both studies, the main findings remained statistically significant after controlling for Big Five personality traits.     

Emotional mood and memory in young children

Two experiments examined affect-dependent memory with preschool/kindergarten and third-grade children. A two-list intentional learning procedure was used to assess the effects of the congruent versus incongruent relationship between affect (happy vs sad) during initial list learning and affect (happy vs sad) during a delayed recall test. When induction of emotional mood was preceded by relaxation exercises in Experiment 1, no evidence of affect dependence was observed. When the relaxation procedure was omitted in Experiment 2, the affect-dependent pattern was obtained in both free recall and cued recall for both age groups. The results of Experiment 2 show that affect-dependent memory is a reasonably robust phenomenon in children and that hypnosis is not necessary for its appearance. However, the phenomenon is apparently absent under conditions of relaxation, a result consistent with two-factor theories of emotion.     

Positioning Asian Americans in social cognition

Asian Americans are increasingly positioned at the center of current events, yet extant theories and approaches in social psychology (and social cognition specifically) may not adequately capture how Asian Americans are perceived and treated in the current American racial landscape. We propose three directions to propel social cognition research on Asian Americans. First, research emphasizes Asian Americans' perceived high status (e.g., the model minority stereotype) while often overlooking their perceived foreignness. The two-dimensional Racial Position Model elucidates the consequences of being stereotyped as perpetual foreigners for Asian Americans and their relations with other racial and ethnic groups. Second, research and laypeople alike consider East Asian Americans to be the prototypical Asian Americans, thereby excluding subgroups such as South and Southeast Asian Americans. Considering the ethnic diversity of Asian Americans challenges and extends existing social psychological theories. Lastly, much of psychological research approaches race in isolation without considering its intersection with other identities such as gender. An intersectional framework offers insights into how Asian Americans' gender and race overlap in our social cognition. More nuanced research on Asian Americans is needed to fully understand race relations in the 21st century and we hope these three interconnected directions can guide researchers who are interested in the topic.     

Frames of reference in social cognition

How is mindreading affected by social context? It is often implicitly assumed that there is one single way to understand others, whatever the situation or the identity of the person. In contrast, I emphasize the duality of functions of mindreading depending on the context (social interaction and social observation), as well as the duality of social frames of reference (egocentric and allocentric). I argue in favour of a functional distinction between knowledge-oriented mindreading and interaction-oriented mindreading. They both aim at understanding other people's behaviour. But they do so using different strategies. However, to say that mindreading has two functions does not suffice to show that there are two kinds of mindreading. One and the same ability could accomplish different functions. Unfortunately, there has been almost no experimental data on a possible dissociation between two kinds of mindreading abilities. Nonetheless, I discuss a few results that point towards a dual ability.     

Human ostensive signals do not enhance gaze following in chimpanzees,but do enhance object-oriented attention

The previous studies have shown that human infants and domestic dogs follow the gaze of a human agent only when the agent has addressed them ostensively—e.g., by making eye contact, or calling their name. This evidence is interpreted as showing that they expect ostensive signals to precede referential information. The present study tested chimpanzees, one of the closest relatives to humans, in a series of eye-tracking experiments using an experimental design adapted from these previous studies. In the ostension conditions, a human actor made eye contact, called the participant’s name, and then looked at one of two objects. In the control conditions, a salient cue, which differed in each experiment (a colorful object, the actor’s nodding, or an eating action), attracted participants’ attention to the actor’s face, and then the actor looked at the object. Overall, chimpanzees followed the actor’s gaze to the cued object in both ostension and control conditions, and the ostensive signals did not enhance gaze following more than the control attention-getters. However, the ostensive signals enhanced subsequent attention to both target and distractor objects (but not to the actor’s face) more strongly than the control attention-getters—especially in the chimpanzees who had a close relationship with human caregivers. We interpret this as showing that chimpanzees have a simple form of communicative expectations on the basis of ostensive signals, but unlike human infants and dogs, they do not subsequently use the experimenter’s gaze to infer the intended referent. These results may reflect a limitation of non-domesticated species for interpreting humans’ ostensive signals in inter-species communication.     

Social emotions and social cognition in the development of social anxiety disorder

ABSTRACT

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most prevalent mental disorders with serious individual impairments and societal costs. Little is known about the mechanisms involved in SAD development. Here, I propose that dysregulated social emotions (social fear and shyness) are crucial for SAD development and that these dysregulated social emotions originate in the disturbances in socio-cognitive abilities. The research from our lab confirmed this. It showed that behavioural and physiological indices of social fear contribute to the development of SAD in toddlerhood and early childhood. Later in childhood, between ages 4.5 and 7.5, we found a new risk factor for SAD―dysregulated shyness. Specifically, we found that negative shy expressions and prolonged physiological blushing (temperature increase) contribute to SAD development. Whereas elevated fear may be rooted in deficits in socio-cognitive skills, dysregulated shyness may be rooted in advanced socio-cognitive abilities. These findings imply that dysregulated social emotions play an important role in SAD and should be explicitly targeted in clinical treatments of SAD.     

The role of social cognition in emotion

Although recent research has shown that social cognition and emotion engage overlapping regions of the brain, few accounts of this overlap have been offered. What systems might be commonly or distinctively involved in each? The close functional relationship between social cognition and emotion might be understood in terms of a central role for mental state attribution in the understanding, learning and regulation of emotion. In each of these cases, mental state attributions might be supported by either stimulus-driven or more reflective processes.     

Action, mindreading and embodied social cognition

One of the central insights of the embodied cognition (EC) movement is that cognition is closely tied to action. In this paper, I formulate an EC-inspired hypothesis concerning social cognition. In this domain, most think that our capacity to understand and interact with one another is best explained by appeal to some form of mindreading. I argue that prominent accounts of mindreading likely contain a significant lacuna. Evidence indicates that what I call an agent??s actional processes and states??her goals, needs, intentions, desires, and so on??likely play important roles in and for mindreading processes. If so, a full understanding of mindreading processes and their role in cognition more broadly will require an understanding of how actional mental processes interact with, influence, or take part in mindreading processes.     

Ongoing development of social cognition in adolescence

Age differences in social cognition between adolescents and young adults were investigated. Two large groups of adolescents and young adults were given tasks of theory of mind and emotion recognition. In addition, to control for possibly related basic cognitive development, working memory, speed of processing, and verbal ability were assessed. A strong age effect was revealed across both measures of social cognition. Adolescents performed with a lower accuracy than adults. Further analyses indicated that those age differences remained significant even after controlling for basic cognitive abilities. Exploratory analyses indicated no influence of pubertal phase on social cognition. Results suggest ongoing development of social cognition across adolescence, independent of individual differences in more basic cognitive abilities.     

Friends,friendlessness, and social cognition

I applaud the methods and findings of the target article by Fink and colleagues (Brit. J. Dev. Psychol, 2015; 33, 1–17) who demonstrate an important link between theory of mind and children's social lives. In particular, enhanced theory of mind in preschool buffers children from friendlessness in the transition to school. Going further, I suggest needed steps for the field to experimentally demonstrate causal links between children's theory of mind and their social actions and interactions.