Interacting with others Flashcards
How do humans navigate the social world so easily?
Cognition allows us to understand and make sense of the world
What are the ‘cold’ cognitive processes involved in the human navigation of the social world?
- Perception
- Memory
- Visual processing
- Attention
- Reasoning
- Problem solving
What are the ‘hot’ cognitive processes involved in the human navigation of the social world?
- Information processing within social and emotional contexts
What are the double neurocognitive dissociations found in real life?
- High-functionning autism: intact neurocognition BUT social cognitive deficits
- Williams syndrome: impaired neurocognition (low IQ) BUT very social
- Acquired brain damage: can function intellectually BUT can’t function socially
How does one know what behaviour is appropriate around others?
Social cognitive processes that act together give us guidelines as to what is appropriate, and are necessary to sustain interactions and relationships
What are the key social cognitive domains?
- Theory of mind (mentalising)
- Emotion perception (recognition)
- Social perception
- Attribution style
What is theory of mind?
Mentalising, or perspective taking
- most widely-researched cognitive domain
- ability to take another’s person’s standpoint into account and to make attributions about their intentions, desires and beliefs
What characterises the tasks used to measure theory of mind?
- Interpretation of mental states of characters in cartoons
- False-belief identification or picture sequencing tasks
- More intricate measures that require the interpretation of indirect speech, sarcasm, irony or humour
- Mostly use 3rd person perspective
e. g. Sally-Anne false belief task
What is emotion perception?
Ability to perceive and interpret emotions
- fundamental in deciphering other people’s social signals
What is the type of tasks used to measure emotion perception?
- Individuals are shown displays of emotions in faces, which may be morphed to be more difficult to recognise
- Apply emotion recognition to speech: recognise emotions in voices
- Ask participants to look at emotions in passive way rather than verbalising which emotion they see
What is social perception?
Ability to judge social roles and rules within the social context
- requires the use of social cues to infer situational events that generated the social cue
What characterises the tests used to measure social perception?
- Identify interpersonal features in the situation (cues generated by single person): intimacy, status, mood
- Perception of relationships between other people
What is social knowledge?
Awareness of the roles, rules, and goals that characterise social situations and guide social interactions
Why are social perception and social knowledge very closely associated functions?
Identification of social cues frequently requires some knowledge of what is typical in specific social situations
What is an attribution style?
- How one explains the causes for positive and negative outcomes
- How the meaning of events is based on one’s attribution of their cause
How are attribution styles measured?
Questionnaires
- e.g. Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions questionnaire (IPSAQ) of Kinderman and Bentall (1996)
What does the internal, personal and situational attributions questionnaire (IPSAQ) of Kinderman and Bentall (1996) consist of?
Allows for distinction between:
- external personal attributions (caused by others)
- external situational attributions (caused by situations)
- internal attributions (caused by oneself)
What does the social brain refer to?
Interdisciplinary new field of neuroscience investigating the underlying biological processes of social cognition and behaviour
What are the social cognitive subdomains distinguished by Michael Green?
- Experience sharing
- Emotion experience
- Emotion regulation
What does Michael Green’s social cognitive subdomain of experience sharing consist of?
Mirror processing that takes place while watching another person
What does Michael Green’s social cognitive subdomain of emotion experience consist of?
- Response you have when seeing unpleasant or pleasant image
- Generally assessed via self-report, physiological reactions or expressions
What does Michael Green’s social cognitive subdomain of emotion regulation consist of?
- Self-reflective strategies such as reappraisal
- Appraising a situation in various ways in order to change you emotion/mood
What are different emotion recognition processes?
- Face perception
- Voice perception
- Emotion experience
- Emotional regulation
- Mentalising (theory of mind)
What are the brain regions involved in face perception?
- Amygdala
- Fusiform face area (FFA)
What are the brain regions involved in voice perception?
- Superior temporal gyrus (STG)
- Inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (Broca’s area)
What are the brain regions involved in emotion experience?
- Amygdala
- Anterior hippocampus
- Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)
- Insula
What are the brain regions involved in emotional regulation?
- Dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC)
- Ventrolateral PFC (vlPFC)
- Amygdala
What are the brain regions involved in mentalising (theory of mind)?
- Temporoparietal junction (TPJ)
- Temporal lobe)
- Precuneus
- Area in the medial PFC (mPFC)
What is the default mode network?
Brain areas active during a resting state, when inactive
How is the social brain network associated to the default mode network?
Brain areas typically activated during social-cognitive processing, overlap with brain regions of default mode network (DMN)
What is the resting state?
An index of unconstrained, non-task related cognition
What is suggested by the overlap of brain activity between the social brain network and the default mode network?
The absence of a task-related focus lead people to think about themselves and others
- > social nature of humans
- > predisposition of social cognition
What makes schizophrenia a social disorder?
Social problems are reflected in the social cognitive deficits and social symptoms of the disorder (DSM-5: social/occupational dysfunction as criterion of schizophrenia)
(e.g. paranoia: distrust in others)
What does the 20 year latent class trajectory analysis of social functioning in psychotic illness by Velthorse and colleagues (2016) show?
- High unmet need in large subgroup with enduring social impairment lasting into later stages of the disorder
- If social impairments are present, they often seem to have their onset before the first psychotic episode
- > value of early intervention strategies
- Schizophrenia appears as a social disorder with social impairments at different levels
- Impairments in social cognition and social functioning
- Social symptoms exist: paranoia, low social motivation
What the meta-analyses on social cognition and schizophrenia show?
- Cognitive impairments in large number of patients (up to 75%)
- Impairment reported in patients in remission -> not just secondary to high symptom levels
- Some longitudinal studies show social cognitive impairment rather stable across illness course
- Attribution bias seems to change with symptoms
- Similar impairments to cognition in unaffected first degree relatives of patients
- > social cognitive impairments might be an end-phenotype for the illness
What is the link between cognitive functioning and functioning in real-life?
If social cognition explains real-life outcomes, then this could give indications about treatment targets
-> improvement in functioning
What did the meta-analysis of Fett and colleagues (2011) on cognitive functioning and real-life functioning show?
- Highlights potential importance of social cognition regarding real-life outcomes
- Ability to process social stimuli seems to have important impact
- Informs treatment approaches
What does the research of Couture and colleagues on the interplay between social cognition and social functioning in schizophrenia show?
- Positive symptoms are associated with social cognitive deficits
- BUT strongest associations are present with negative symptoms
- Some have hypothesised that paranoia may be based on a hyper theory of mind (over-mentalisation)
What do the studies on the differences of brain activity during theory of mind tasks between controls and patients show?
- Pattern of lower brain activation in schizophrenia patients
- Higher brain activation in schizophrenia could point to compensatory processing strategies in the absence of behavioural differences on the task
What do the meta-analyses on the neural mechanism of emotion recognition show?
Extended patterns of reduced activation in schizophrenia patients compared to healthy controls
What do the current research findings on the social brain and schizophrenia suggest?
- Behavioural differences are associated with differential brain processing in schizophrenia
- It’s unclear whether brain abnormalities drive behavioural differences or wether they are a reflection of different behaviour
What could the underlying mechanisms which drive the brain abnormalities observed in schizophrenia patients be?
- Gene-environment interactions
- Brain differences
e. g. prolonged exposure to stress resulting in abnormal brain development and connectivity changes
What could explain the variation between studies in the neuroimaging literature?
- Heterogeneous samples and tasks
- Difference in methodology
