w8 Social cognition Flashcards
social cognition focuses on…
how people process, store and apply information about other people and social situations
social cognition concerns…
Understanding of the self
First step towards fluent social interaction
Considering one’s own being as an object -> the self can be subject to objective consideration = self-reflective thought
mirror test (with self-recognition and the mark at the forehead)
self-reference
embodiment
Brain regions involved in self-reflection
PCC: posterior cingulate cortex
IPS: intraparietal sulcus
MPF: medial prefrontal cortex
embodiment vs social cognition
The sense of being localized within one’s own body
Gives rise to self-location
Egocentric and non-egocentric frames of reference are possible
embodiment: brain regions involved
extrastriate visual cortex is active if people visually process human bodies, imagine changes in positions, take third person’s perspective
temporo-parietal junction - out-of-body experience, mental rotation of a body tasks
and others
Perception of social cues in the face and the body
Complicated neural architecture with two pathways enables perception of social cues in the face
The importance of eye features in socioemotional communication
Superior temporal sulcus signals expectancy violation
social referencing
Modulating attentional orienting by gaze cuing
social cognition & gaze & emotion
amygdata activates more if somebody is looking directly at you, so direct gaze is perceived as a threat
part of the brain that responds to the movements that are meaningful and goal-directed or violate expectations
superior temporal sulcus
social referencing
we use the emotional facial expressions not to express our emotions but to indicate how the other should treat something
Social categorization
- Place people into social groups based on characteristics
- Forming impressions and making sense of the world
- Automatic and controlled process
- Survival function but also prejudicial reactions
what’s that and which brain areas active?
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Amygdala
the other physiological reaction is startle eye-blink
A two-stage model of cognitive control
(1) anterior cingulate activity reflects continual monitoring of conflict during information processing
(2) prefrontal regions are subsequently recruited to implement regulatory responses once a need for conflict resolution has been detected.
racial bias: brain areas involved
amygdala (in IAT detected)
Anterior cingulate -> conflict monitoring
Prefrontal regions -> regulatory responses (oh my god, I’m seing a black person and I’m thinking she’s bad, it’s racism, she’s most likely nice… - so the regulation of the conflict)
ERPs of the racial bias
Error-Related Negativity (ERN) - sensitive to information-processing conflicts that lead to response errors. localized to the anterior cingulate gyrus and offers a potential neural index of ongoing conflict monitoring
they were primed with the face and then later asked if the image was a tool or a gun. The ERN was larger for tools primed by African American faces than for the other face-object combinations
Understanding the actions and emotions of others
theory of mind
empathy vs sympathy and brain regions involved
empathy vs sympathy
Empathy: sharing the same feeling expressed by another individual
Sympathy: having feelings of pity or concern for another individual’s unfortunate situation without experiencing the same feelings
Model of empathy
a full empathic response, which can be initiated either automatically or voluntarily, requires the coordinated operation of four component processes
social competition vs stress
the alpha-baboon is stressed, and the beta is less stressed, but then the lower you are - the more stress
also among people in Western societies the lower socio-economic status is associated with stress, mental illness and cardio-vascular diseases
so it looks like there is a link
Which term describes the ability to consider one’s own being as an object of thought?
self-reflective thought
Which term describes the ability to represent the internal mental states of other individuals?
theory of mind
Which term describes the use of (non)verbal expressions of others to determine how to deal with ambiguous situations?
Social referencing
Which brain area has been found to respond strongly to both very untrustworthy and very trustworthy faces?
amygdala
which term describes the sense of physical location of the self within one’s own body?
embodiment
which plane is this?
saggital or longitudinal
which plane is this?
axial or horizontal
