week 7 - social cognition Flashcards
(40 cards)
Social cognitive neuroscience
: a new field aimed at tackling the problem of understanding how brain function supports the cognitive processes underlying social behaviour. Emphasises that situations and contexts influence how we think or act.
Social Cognition:
An umbrella term used to describe a collection of advanced cognitive functions that involve detecting and manipulating interpersonal cues to construct representations of the relation between oneself and others.
Failure to understand the feelings and intentions of others has an immediate, deleterious impact on interpersonal interactions. Social Cognition = prerequisite for adaptive social behaviour
Emotion recognition and perceptual abilities (especially facial expression of emotion) are the hallmarks of social cognition. These processes refer to an individual’s capacity to accurately infer the emotions of others
Attribution biases
are perceptual errors (i.e., motivational and cognitive) that distort an individual’s interpretation of an event.
Empathy
an individual’s ability to understand and respond to the emotional experiences of others.
Affective empathy
The ability to have affective reactions consistent with the observed experiences of others (e.g., feeling the heartache of a friend who recently separated from their partner).
Cognitive empathy
capacity to engage another person’s psychological point of view (e.g., appreciating your friend has conflicting feelings but not sharing in these feelings).
First and Second Order Processes
A theory of mind is required because no-one has direct access into the mind and thoughts of others. To talk to other people, emphathise with them, you have to be aware of the behavioral, social and cultural cues that indicate both what they are thinking, feeling and planning.
First order cognitive and affective TOM/Em
Anatomical Substrates of Self-referential processing:
MPFC, DLPFC, VMPFC, posterior cingulate cortex, and medial and lateral parietal cortex
Anatomical Substrates of Subjective feelings contributing to our sense of self:
OFC, anterior cingulate cortex, (ACC) insula, ANS, endocrine systems that regulate emotion and reactivity and temporal lobe (memory)
Anatomical substrates of Understanding others (ToM, empathy):
amygdala, superior temporal sulcus, medial PFC, OFC, ACC, fusiform face area, mirror neuron systems, temporoparietal junction, medial parietal cortex
OPFC Damage
Coup contre-coup injuries
Social Symptoms
Socially inappropriate – discuss personal or boring topics
Inappropriate conduct: Stare, sit too close, hug inappropriately, less inhibition
Lower tolerance for frustration, increased aggression, immaturity
Impaired goal directed behavior
Low insight into changes – they understand social rules, but fail to recognize when they have broken these rules in the moment.
Blunted affected and emotional coldness.
OPFC Damage -famous cases etc
Many patients can perform normally on neuropsychological tests despite huge changes in social functioning and decision making abilities.
Coup injuries – from eye sockets incl. jagged bony ridges provide support for eye but likes knives slicing brain tissue
Famous cases: Phineas Gage, E. V. R.
EVR – lost most of his VMPFC when a tumour was removed – meningioma which had extended bilaterally.
Self-Referential processing
Sense of self relies on being able to distinguish self-knowledge and the knowledge we have about other’s characteristics, desires, and thoughts
Information processed in a more meaningful way is remembered better than information processed in a superficial way (e.g., remember happy and how well it describes yourself vs. judging its font).
Evidence suggests that our self-knowledge does not depend on reflecting on actual experiences to understand and determine personality features, but rather is based on information abstracted from these experiences
It is possible to maintain a sense of self in the absence of autobiographical memories (e.g., patients with retrograde amnesia or korsakoffs syndrome), because a distinct neural system supports the summaries of personality traits typically used to make self-descriptive judgements.
Self-reference effect:
enhanced memory for information processed in relation to the self
Studies show that participants are most likely to remember words from the self condition (does this word describe you) and least likely to remember words from the printed-format condition (is this word printed in upper case?)
MPFC differentially activated during self-conditions
Level of activity in MPFC predicted which items would be remembered on surprise memory test
Me Vs. You Processing
Self-descriptive
We rely on summaries of our personality traits rather than considering evidence from our lives
Other-descriptive
When we make judgments of other people we focus on specific instances that are associated with the adjective.
Self-Referential processing
Chronic self-referential processing thought to be a ‘default’ mode of brain function
Higher activity in the MPFC = thinking about what we might do or evaluating current condition
Sentinel hypotheses: the default network ensures that an individual always has some idea of what is going on around them.
Default network: MPFC, precuneus, temporoparietal junction, medial temporal lobe, lateral parietal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex.
DMPFC activity enhanced during daydreams
DMPFC activity attenuated during goal-directed behaviour
Self-Referential processing\ -MORE
Brain doesn’t turn off like a TV during rest
When at rest blood continues to circulate around your brain indicating that our brains continue to engage in a number of psychological processes that describe a default mode of brain function
Default network also involved in autobiogrpahical memory tasks, tasks envisioning the self in the future or navigating to a different location, or evaluating a personal moral delimma (e.g., would you push one person off a sinking boat to save 5 others).
How accurately do we process information?
SELF-REF PROC
How accurately do we process information?
ACC – selectively attends to positive information about the self
–70% of school-students rank above average in leadership
–93% of college professors believe they are above average in their work
–50% rate above average in intelligence and physical attractiveness.
OFC – ensures that positively biased self-views do not deviate too far reality
VMPFC – helps us predict what we like and dislike
Px with damage made inconsistent decisions about their likes/dislikes (e.g., Cruise vs. Affleck?)
VMPFC – predicts our state of mind
The more activated it is when we consider the future, the less short-sighted our decisions will be
how do we predict our own mental state?
We often view ourselves through rose-coloured glasses: Network of frontal cortex regions permit a focus on positive aspects of the self without deviating too far from reality
How do we predict our own mental states? Do we consider actual experiences and predict from there? Or do we use a set of rules that output a prediction?
When participants had to make predictions about their mental states in novel scenarios (e.g., would you prefer to spend a year on Mars or in a submarine under a polar icecap) fMRI revealed that the ventral region of the MPFC was consistently engaged. As these types of questions nobody has experienced, and there are no general rules about how to choose – it suggests that we begin by simulating the experience and then predict which one we would like better.
Theory of mind (toM)
Using verbal and non-verbal cues to understanding the thoughts, feelings and intentions (mental states) of others, whilst distinguishing them from our own (viz., mentalising)
Empathic accuracy – the perceiver’s accuracy in inferring a target person’s thoughts and feelings (spouses: empathic accuracy is between 30-35%)
.
ToM basis of human cooperation and predicts successful performance in a wide range of social activities
—80% of waking time is spent in company of others
—80-90% of conversations are spent talking about ourselves and others.
Understanding the consistency or discrepancy between nonverbal cues and mental states of others helps us to judge their actions and determine characteristics such as trustworthiness.
Impairments: ASD, brain injured populations, schizophrenia
What sort of activities does one need intact ToM for?
A big part of ToM is being able to identify if someone is being genuine, making excuses, lying etc. E.g., imagine asking someone on a date, and that person declines apologetically claiming to have other plans, but smiles and touches your arm how you interpret this will largely influence whether you pursue things further or whether you are dissuaded from trying again.
Sally-Anne test
marble is put into the box, if a person (kid) has TOM - they should say sally should look in the box
Developmental Milestones
Curiosity about others appears at birth and is a primary source of motivation throughout life (e.g., infants prefer to look at human face rather than other objects)
Sally-Anne Test – false-belief task – first order cognitive ToM - presence or absence of ToM
12m can point to location of object that an adult is looking for
15m surprise to changed location of an object understanding that the person didn’t expect to find the object there
17m – understand that another can hold a false belief
3-4yrs – understand physical vantage point gives them a different perspective
5-6 yrs– understand their mental states are distinct from those of other people
6-7 yrs – understand difference between literal meanings of words and sarcasm (irony, joke and lie)
9-11 yrs – simultaneously represent more than one mental state
Theories of Theory of Mind:
Simulation theory (experience sharing system)
Observe behaviour > imitate it >physiological response > infer the other person is feeling the same way
Involves mirror neuron system
The medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) is involved in the perception of others, when we use ourselves to understand others
