Social Cognition and Emotion Flashcards
Definition of social cognition.
Thinking about the actions and intentions of others, with individual differences in capacities and frequency of use.
e.g. Theory of mind, empathy, emotion recognition, shared imagining and episodic memory
What is Theory of Mind?
A component of social cognition which is the understanding that people’s actions are motivated by internal mental states
How do 1-year-old infants display precursors to Theory of Mind?
- Imitation: building understanding of others’ actions and differentiating with own actions
- Joint attention: being aware of others’ visual experience and differentiating from own experience
- Pretend play: taking on other perspectives, while distinguishing between reality and fantasy
- Emotion understanding: identifying and understanding causes of 6 basic emotions
What are Wellman’s two stages of ToM development?
- Desire psychology (age 2): understanding that people’s behaviours are driven by their desires
- Belief-desire psychology (age 4): understanding that desires are led by their opinion on the desired object/action
What is the diverse beliefs stage of ToM Development?
The understanding that different people can hold different beliefs about the same object/event, and these beliefs will guide their behaviour regarding the object
What is the knowledge access stage of ToM development?
The understanding that seeing an object/event grants the viewer the knowledge of that object
What is the false belief stage of ToM development?
The understanding that beliefs can be false, but people with those false beliefs will still act in accordance with them
What is the hidden emotion stage of ToM development?
The understanding that there can be a difference between how an individual feels compared to what they are experiencing
What is the proposed 6th stage of ToM development by Peterson and colleagues?
The understanding that there can be a difference between what an individual says compared to what they mean
What are the levels of visual perspective-taking?
- Basic ability emerges in first year
- Level 1: inferring what objects the other person can and cannot see (from 2 years)
- Level 2: mentally computing how a scene looks from another person’s perspective (from 6-7 years)
What is the cognitive/emotional form of perspective-taking?
The ability to imagine and understand why others think and feel as they do, and how this can differ from one’s thoughts and feelings
Definition of empathy
The ability to understand, be aware of and sensitive to and vicariously experiencing the experience of another without having that experience fully communicated explicitly.
How does cognitive/emotional perspective-taking change during adolescence?
- Around 12 years, becoming more capable of holding multiple mental representations of differing perspectives simultaneously
- Drawback of wondering how others perceive you, and understanding opinions and feelings might not be mutual
- Prefrontal cortex still developing, associated with social cognition
Empirical evidence of adolescents’ ability to perspective-take and their tendency to do so.
- 158 teens from US
- Took a survey for perspective-taking tendency, rating themselves
- Took a survey about beliefs on gender roles
- Procedure: Gave the teens a vignette and asked about the motivations of the characters, what they were thinking and feeling.
- Results: perspective-taking ability increased with age, but tendency and ability not significantly correlated. Girls more accurate with their ability and tendency. Boys had increase with ability over time, but tendency decreased.
- Implications: the increase in ability of perspective taking does not equate to an increasing tendency to do so
How does cultural influence impact the stages of ToM development?
Children from individualistic cultures (e.g. US, Germany) normally achieve the diverse beliefs stage before knowledge access. Children from collectivistic cultures (e.g. China, Turkey) normally achieve knowledge access stage before diverse beliefs.
