What is influenced by the interaction between our traits and the social context?

Abstract

Social cognition refers to a complex set of mental abilities underlying social stimulus perception, processing, interpretation, and response. Together, these abilities support the development of adequate social competence and adaptation. Social cognition has a protracted development through infancy to adulthood. Given the preponderance of social dysfunctions across neurologic conditions, social cognition is now recognized as a core domain of functioning that warrants clinical attention. This chapter provides an overview of the construct of social cognition, defines some of the most clinically significant sociocognitive abilities (face processing, facial expression processing, joint attention, theory of mind, empathy, and moral processing), and introduces the neural networks and frameworks associated with these abilities. Broad principles for understanding the development of social cognition are presented, and a summary of normative developmental milestones of clinically relevant sociocognitive abilities is proposed. General guidelines for sound social cognition assessment in children and adolescents are summarized.

Abstract

Social cognition represents the scientific approach within social psychology dedicated to studying how people process and respond to social information. The first half of this article reviews social cognition's relationship to cognitive and social psychology and traces its intellectual origins and contemporary influences. After reviewing key terms in social cognition (e.g., schemas, heuristics), the article turns to four major theoretical and research developments from the past 15 years. Specifically, the latter half of this article provides an overview of dual-process models, implicit and explicit attitudes, the automaticity of behavior, and social–cognitive neuroscience.

1.1 What do We Mean by Social Cognition?

Social cognition means different things to different people. Most generally, social cognition is defined as any cognitive process that involves other people. These processes can be involved in social interactions at a group level or on a one-to-one basis. When we use the term cognition we refer to unconscious mechanisms in the mind (the brain) that bring about representations (a neural implementation of experience). We can be consciously aware of these representations but mostly we are unaware of them. We know for instance that our own perspective and the perspective of another person on the same event can be quite different. However, when we act in everyday life, we often have to judge other people's perspectives implicitly, which occasionally leads to misinterpretation of others’ actions as insults if we are not made aware of the different viewpoint.

Within social psychology, the traditional understanding of social cognition is taken to mean the study of social knowledge, social structure, group behaviour, social influence, processing biases, whether and how social category (sex, age, race) defines people, stereotyping, memory for social information, and attribution of motives. This work has produced a solid body of knowledge and has contributed to a better understanding of prejudice, peer pressure, group behaviour and bullying.

Within evolutionary biology, social cognition includes processes such as learning and memory in a social context, with respect, for example, to territoriality in animals, dominance and subordination within the social structure and the complexities of living in a group leading to social pressures and stress. Work with social animals such as non-human primates, mice, rats and birds has lead to important advances. Birds for instance have been shown to be capable of tactical deception (Emery and Clayton, 2001). Researchers have already started to sequence genes in social insects (Bourke, 2002).

Within developmental psychology, it is often assumed that the factors governing cognitive performance in terms of interactions with others are a product of individual cognitive abilities and social competence. This is exemplified by Piaget's work on moral development (Piaget, 1972), where he proposed that social agreement was needed for a true understanding of wrong-doing and its punishment. It is also exemplified by Vygotsky's work on learning in a social context (Vygotsky and Vygotsky, 1980), where negotiating with peers helps problem-solving. The study of the development of infants has recently received a great boost through new behavioural techniques. As we shall discuss throughout section 7.2, this work has revealed very early sensitivity to other people.

In the clinical or psychopathological context social impairments are common and contribute a great deal to the burden of mental illness or disability. Autism is one developmental disorder that is defined by social and communication impairment. Here a deficit in one aspect of social cognition, an intuitive ability to attribute thoughts and feelings to others (‘theory of mind’), has been demonstrated (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). In certain types of schizophrenia too such a deficit has been pinpointed (Bentall et al., 2001). Psychopathy has been recently interpreted as a deficit in another aspect of social cognition, a failure in intuitive empathy (Blair et al., 1996). Researchers are currently investigating the brain basis of these cognitive deficits.

It is clear that the field of social cognition represents a huge diversity of interests. We require a broad notion of cognition, incorporating emotional processes, for instance those that underlie empathy. Given this diversity, what we mean by social cognition may be in danger of encompassing everything the mind (brain) does! Even though we believe that social influences are pervasive, a wide definition is not useful. We clearly have to set boundaries on social cognition for this report. We will discuss only those processes of social interaction and communication that are required when talking about the effect of one person on another. These processes must not be so vague as to be impossible to explain by computational and/or neural mechanisms.

It is only relatively recently that the search for the biological basis of social cognition has started, from genes to brain processes. We still do not know just how biological factors interact with environmental variables to produce individual differences and pathology. Clearly, the study of such processes needs to be influenced, if not carried out, by scientists from a variety of disciplines.

How special is social cognition as compared with other cognitive processes? It could be that social cognition is simply a very complex example of how cognitive functions have to be organized to deal with complex processing demands. However, the idea that there are specific social processes is attractive. Or can we explain the more complex phenomena of social cognition by basic cognitive processes, such as visual perception, memory and attention? Is face processing, for instance, any different from the perception of other complex stimuli with emotional overtones? Although general cognitive processes such as visual perception, memory and attention are vital to social competence, in this report we focus mainly on processes that appear to be special to social interaction.

Introduction

Social cognition refers to the unique processes that enable human beings to interpret social information and behave appropriately in a social environment. As in other domains of cognition, social information processing relies initially on attending to and perceiving relevant cues. The nature and importance of social information is then determined by rapid, automatic emotion-driven mechanisms, and attitudes, biases, stereotypical tendencies, and personality traits create individual differences in how social information is interpreted. Social information is further processed via more conscious and controlled mechanisms, involving reasoning about others' thoughts, emotions, and intentions while using acquired knowledge about social concepts and common sequences of behavior that typically occur in social interchanges. After perceiving and interpreting social information, a behavioral response is selected and enacted, often requiring executive and regulatory processes. In this entry, these fundamental social cognitive functions and their neuroanatomical correlates are summarized.

What Is Social Cognition?

Social cognitions involve thoughts about others and thoughts about the self in relationship to others. When we consider cognitive aging from this point of view, it leads us away from traditional research methods and theoretical perspectives that have focused on basic information processing and how it is tied to physiological decline. This body of research has been largely experimental and often has taken place in situations designed to remove the effects of the social context. In contrast, research on social cognition and aging typically is designed to consider how social context affects the thinking of adults.

Work on social cognition has raised important issues inherent in understanding what it means to grow old as a social being. Our life stories, experiences, social competence, core values, and general understanding of the social world have a profound effect on our development at any age. To address these issues, we must consider both basic cognitive processes and abilities in the aging adult as well as everyday cognitive functioning in a social context. Cognitive capacity and speed of processing do show losses in old age. Nevertheless, the vast majority of older adults are skilled and effective in their interactions with their social environment. The basic goal of the social cognitive approach is to understand how people make sense of themselves, others, and events in everyday life. This article examines our current understanding of these processes by looking at five different areas of social cognitive research: person perception and stereotypes, socioemotional selectivity, collaborative cognition, morality, and positive psychology.

Definitional Issues and Scope

The Face of Communication

Face perception is one of the most important aspects of social cognition. We use information transmitted from the face when we reason about other people and try to understand what may be on their minds. Face recognition is a critical skill that develops early and supports our social abilities. Emotion recognition is perhaps second to face recognition in enabling social reasoning. People’s facial expressions give us important clues regarding how they are feeling and reacting to ongoing events. These clues can be subtle, but people who can perceive emotions from faces and from listening to the tone of voice cues are in a privileged position to better understand others and anticipate actions and statements that will help to guide, build consensus, and lead others.

1.1 Terms that are used to refer to social cognition

In the research literature, terms that refer to aspects of social cognition are often used interchangeably and in different ways by different researchers. Empathy carries the sense of feeling the feelings of others. In Latin, the word means “feeling inside” or “feeling with.” On the other hand, theory of mind (TOM) is often used to highlight the idea that we normally have complex metacognitive understandings of our own minds, as well as the minds of others—including cognitive and affective aspects. Similarly, Frith and Frith (1999) introduced the term mentalizing to capture the idea that when we have a well-developed theory of mind, we understand ourselves and others not just as sensory objects but also as subjective beings with mental states. We understand others as having mental states that we can anticipate and use to guide our own behaviors. Mind reading, like mentalizing, identifies our ability to attune our own behaviors to the minds and anticipated actions of others.

One of the most difficult aspects of the concept of theory of mind is understanding the difference between seeing others as sensory objects versus seeing others as subjective beings with minds and mental states. Having a complete TOM gives us the ability to go beyond the sensory into the mental. We can do things that those with deficient TOMs cannot do. Once we have a TOM, we can pretend, lie, deceive, guess, play hide-and-seek, and predict and understand the full range of human emotion. People who have deficits in TOM (e.g., people with autism) have limited abilities to do these things, as we will see.

Philosophers use the term intentionality when they want to speak about how minds and mental states are always “about something else” in a way that other physical objects, such as body parts, are not. Our thoughts always have an object. For example, we think “about” the chair, the book, or the idea in a way that our stomach, arm, or tooth is not about anything other than itself. Minds have mental states; minds represent objects and events outside themselves. It is not clear that other species comprehend the intentional nature of minds in their conspecifics. Humans seem to have an implicit understanding of the contents of others' minds.

A separate concept is the psychological term intention, which is our ability to form an image of a goal state and to organize action in pursuit of that goal state. You must be careful not to confuse these two very similar terms! Theory of mind abilities allow us to read the intentions of others and to share attention with others about a common focus.

Finally, the term intersubjectivity emphasizes our ability to coordinate mutual interactions in light of our perception of the subjectivity and intentionality of others. When this ability is absent, we readily recognize the deficiency in the social exchanges of others. Examples are found in autistic spectrum disorders, in the sometimes deficient emotion recognition of schizophrenia, and in the empathic failures of psychopathic and borderline personalities.

Introduction

In everyday life we constantly interact with the people around us, whether it is to cooperate, compete, or simply to go about our day-to-day business. For such interactions to be successful we must be able to understand and predict the actions of these other people. We typically understand actions in terms of minds: beliefs, desires, and intentions. This is termed having an ‘intentional stance’ or having a ‘theory of mind,’ while our ability to ‘read’ mental states has been called ‘mentalizing.’ A range of functional imaging studies have attempted to identify the neural correlates of mentalizing when participants make ‘off-line’ inferences about the mental states of interacting characters in stories, cartoons, and animations. A number of brain regions have been consistently activated by these tasks, including the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporal poles, and temporoparietal junction.

Yet, like most psychological and neuroimaging studies, these studies were investigations of people in isolation. Even imaging studies of social cognition do not typically involve true interactions. Brain activity is measured in various social contexts or when an individual thinks about her own mental states or those of another person. In all of these paradigms the flow of information is one way. The participant simply responds to a facial expression or to a social scenario. In a true interaction the information flows both ways. We do not simply read the signals of others. We send back signals for them to read. We do not simply respond passively to other persons, we respond actively in order to change them: to make them trust us or fear us. For such interactions, it is not sufficient to represent our own mental state or the mental state of the other. We need also to represent the other’s representation of our mental state. In a successful interaction our mental states are effectively shared. Perhaps the simplest example of such an interaction is joint attention, in which each participant knows that there is mutual attention to the same object. However, it is only recently that studies have started to investigate how brain systems are engaged when we directly interact with another person in order to perform ‘on-line’ mentalizing.

The most basic form of social interaction is joint action in which two people cooperate in order to achieve some common goal. In order to successfully achieve their shared goal, participants must understand how they and their partner view each other’s roles within the partnership. This process involves at least four levels of mentalizing: (1) our belief about our partner’s role, (2) our belief about how our partner views his role, (3) our belief about how our partner believes we view our role, and finally (4) our belief about how our partner believes we view him. If we are able to represent all levels of this mentalizing structure, we should be able to understand the intentions of our partner and predict his actions.

This section summarizes findings from recent studies in which two participants socially interact in a variety of tasks. We start by noting some important behavioral studies and then discuss neuroimaging findings that suggest an important role for the medial frontal cortex, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), in on-line social interaction. Next, we highlight the new breed of ‘hyperscanning’ studies that go beyond analysis of a single brain to look at systems of interacting brains.

Conclusion

SCIT is a comprehensive social cognitive intervention designed to target multiple domains of social cognition. From a metacognitive perspective, SCIT aims to enhance patients’ use of adaptive social cognitive strategies in the social world by promoting effortless learning during SCIT treatment. This increases the automaticity of adaptive strategies so that when patients think about the process it feels natural to them (schemed in Fig. 9.3). Research involving SCIT confirms good patient adherence and has provided promising results not only in terms of improvement in social cognitive domains such as emotion perception and ToM but also in improved social skill and functioning. Future lines of research should replicate these findings using larger and more representative samples but also explore SCIT’s potential with different patient populations such as ASD or personality disorders characterized by dysfunctional social cognition.