Social Cognition Flashcards
What is the Sally Anne false belief task? Do children pass this test?
Ps view a series of drawings
Sally places her marble in the basket
Sally exits
Anne puts this marble from the basket to the drawer
Sally re-enters
Where does Sally look for the marble?
Ps must understand that Sally and Anne have different beliefs/different perspectives on the world
Children don’t pass this test till about 4 years old
What did Wicker’s 2003 study find on disgust?
Inhaled odours that produced disgust
The same sites of the anterior insula were engaged as when they observed facial expressions of disgust
What did Singer’s 2004 study on experiencing pain find?
The insula and anterior cingulate activate when one is experiencing physical pain as well as during the perception of pain of others
What did Singer’s 2006 study on empathy find?
Male and female participants
Card game
2 confederates: one cheater, one who did not
Watched the cheating confederate in pain
Used FMRIs
Male ps experienced no empathy when they saw the cheater in pain
For women, there was a small decrease in empathy
How do mirror neurons work in children with ASD?
For ASD children, some types of imitation are more difficult but some are easier
It’s easier when the goal is clear or when the person being copied is familiar
Sometimes ASD children don’t understand the goal of observed motor acts
How do ASD children perform in the Sally Anne task?
Sally Anne false belief task, they perform these tasks as if the characters have all the information in the story
Some children with ASD can’t solve these problems even when well past the age when most children can
In the Sally Anne task, ASD children act as if Sally knows Anne put the marble in the drawer and therefore assume Sally will look in the drawer
What is the ecological hypothesis?
Large brains are biproduct of the cognitive demands of certain types of behaviours
- foraging (mental mapping)
- innovation and tool use
Gives an advantage for individuals to survive
What is the social learning hypothesis?
Large brains reflect enhanced social skills developed through social competition
Achieve social success: deception, manipulation, alliance formation, exploitation of others’ expertise
Gives an advantage to the individual’s survival
What is the social brain hypothesis?
Large brains reflect enhanced social skills but these influence an individual indirectly
Some ecological challenges require large coherent social groups, which requires social and cognitive skills
Social skills give direct survival advantages to the group and indirectly the individual
What 4 things must be present to define empathy?
- presence of an affective state in oneself
- isomorphism between one’s own and another person’s affective state
- elicitation of one’s own affective state upon observation/imagination of another person’s affective state
- knowledge that the other person’s affective state isn’t one’s own affective state
How does emotional contagion, empathetic concern, sympathy and mentalizing differ from empathy?
Sympathy: emotional response congruent with the other person’s feelings but not necessarily isomorphic
Mentalizing: drawing inferences about other’s mental states
Empathetic concern: Similar to sympathy, but involves motivation to act
Emotion contagion: tendency to automatically mimic and synchronise facial expressions/vocalizations to converge emotionally
How can empathy be measured?
Questionnaires, such as the interpersonal reactivity index, where we can test using perspective taking, empathetic concern, personal distress and fantasy scale.
Neural correlates
What are the findings of the monkeys mirror neurons study?
Neurons that are active when the monkey makes a movement are also activated when the monkey observes the movement being done by someone else
What is the neural correlates of empathy?
Observing or imaging another person in a particular emotional state will automatically activate a representation of that state in an observer
In studies, we usually use pain as it’s easier to imagine/relate
We activate the same areas in our brain when we see someone else experiencing pain
What areas of our brain experience pain?
The insula and anterior cingulate cortex, is responsible for the affective dimension of pain
The somatosensory cortex is responsible for the sensory dimension of pain
What did Ebisch et al’s 2011 study find on shared neural representations on sensations?
Ps watched painful, pleasant, neutral feelings of hand being brushed
Perception of touch associated with increased activity in somatosensory cortices but decreased activity in insular cortex
What are the orders of intentionality in Theory of Mind?
zero order intentionality: an agent possesses no beliefs or desires. Stimuli responds reflexively, such as producing a scream when frightened
first order intentionally: an agent possesses beliefs and desires, but not beliefs about beliefs. May produce a scream because it believes a predator is present
second order intentionality: an agent possesses beliefs about other person’s beliefs, may produce a scream because it wants other’s to know a predator is nearby
third order intentionality: agent possesses beliefs about other people’s beliefs concerning the beliefs of other people, such as I think John thinks that Sally doesn’t know where the marble is
What occurs in the temporal poles and how does it affect ToM?
Neural basis of ToM
Normally activates in tasks of memory and semantic memory
Generate schemas that specify the social and emotional context
Conceptual knowledge
Patients with legions in this areas lose their conceptual knowledge of words, objects and people, but not specific social information
What occurs in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and how does this affect ToM?
Thinking about people
Thinking about others minds
Thinking about oneself
Pragmatics of language (irony)
Inferring of feelings and intentions
Posterior MPFC: links value to actions (monitoring of responses)
Orbital MPFC: links value to real or predicted outcomes (motivational drives)
What occurs in the Temporal parietal junction (TPJ) and how does it effect ToM?
Activated in a variety of tasks such as eye gaze, moving mouths.. so there may exist sub regions
Attribution of mental states to others
Self other distinction in various domains: cognitions and emotions ect
Lesions in this area seem to impair ToM
What is egocentricity bias?
tendency to project our own affective states onto others
What study by Silani et al 2013 investigated egocentricity bias on pleasant and unpleasant stimuli?
Person puts hand in box and experiences something pleasant or unpleasant while watching someone do the same thing, unpleasant or pleasant
So there can be congruent or incongruent conditions
Congruent conditions: we minimise others experiences
In another variation of the same study:
Disrupting activity in the suprachiasmatic gyrus through TMS, EEB (egocentricity bias) increased
How does ToM and empathy differ in autistic individuals?
ToM: autism individuals perform poorly in false belief tasks, ToM deficit is a core feature of autism, however this isn’t sufficient in explaining the condition autism
Empathy: empathy is impaired in autistic individuals, underlying causes for this are controversial, mixed evidence on stimulation and emotion sharing in autism, however a combination of other processes might be better suited to explain empathy deficits such as mentalizing, understanding of emotions or self other distinction
When does pruning occur in adolescence? What areas are affected?
Brain goes under radicalised changes in adolescence
The grey matter prunes out, making connections more specific and specialised
Parts of brain that mature first such as physical movement control and vision
While other regions of higher thinking don’t finish pruning until 20s
What is the last part of the brain to develop? What is this area responsible for?
Last part of the brain to mature is the front, which is largely dominated by the prefrontal cortex
Which is responsible for rational and executive functions: problem solving, planning, weighing consequences, assuming responsibility and inhibiting control
