Topic
Social cognition research, explained
30 open-access social cognition studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- How mirroring body movements affects our feelings
Moving in sync with another person during a conversation naturally boosts positive emotions and reduces negative ones, even if the interaction is competitive.
- Can a shorter eyes test better measure theory of mind?
The original Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test has poor statistical reliability, but a new 10-item short form provides a more reliable measure that is heavily influenced by vocabulary.
- Does feeling you have Einstein's body make you think better?
Young men who were given a virtual Einstein body showed less implicit bias against older people and, depending on their IQ and self-esteem, improved more on a planning task than men given an ordinary body.
- How do autism and conduct problems affect the mind-reading brain?
While children with autism show reduced brain activity in social processing regions during mind-reading tasks, children with conduct problems and callous traits show normal brain activity in these areas.
- Can sensing your heartbeat help you handle social rejection?
People who are better at sensing their own internal bodily cues, like their heartbeat, experience less distress when socially excluded and are more capable of regulating their emotions.
- Do we favour our future or past selves the way we favour 'me now'?
Shapes linked to your present self were matched faster and more accurately than shapes linked to yourself even one day in the past or future, which were treated like a stranger's.
- Social skills and self-control in kids with autism and ADHD
While children with both autism and ADHD struggle with social reasoning, those with autism face more severe difficulties applying these skills in daily life, which are linked to different underlying self-control issues.
- Do schizophrenia and bipolar break social-emotional links?
While healthy people naturally use their social observation skills to help control their emotions, this helpful connection is completely missing in individuals with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
- Measuring intuitive and deliberate emotion recognition in autism
Adults with autism show a larger performance deficit when reading facial emotions intuitively without verbal labels than when deliberately matching faces to words, and unlike neurotypical adults, their intuitive and deliberate performance is highly correlated.
- How do women with BPD and schizophrenia read other people?
While women with schizophrenia struggle with overall social reasoning, women with borderline personality disorder generally understand others well but tend to over-interpret people's intentions.
- Do young children trust a robot the way they trust a person?
Children trusted a robot about as readily as a person overall, but the youngest favoured the human while seven-year-olds favoured the robot once theory of mind was accounted for.
- Does seeing another's viewpoint need working memory?
When people had to hold letters in mind, they got worse at judging what an on-screen avatar could see, suggesting even the 'automatic' part of perspective taking leans on working memory.
- How does the brain process different types of jokes?
Different types of jokes activate distinct brain networks depending on whether they require imagining others' thoughts or using executive control to handle exaggerations and language ambiguities.
- Can feeling a different race's hand as your own reduce bias?
White participants who experienced a simulated sensation of owning a black-skinned hand showed a reduction in implicit racial bias, but only if they initially held negative attitudes.
- How Social Context Shapes Our Attention to Neutral Faces
Negative social stories make us process neutral faces as emotionally charged and capture our attention more quickly than negative non-social stories.
- Does Economic Inequality Make Us Worry About Our Social Status?
Perceiving high economic inequality increases people's anxiety about their social status because they believe their social environment has become intensely competitive.
- How Children Born Without a Corpus Callosum Read Minds
Children missing the main pathway connecting their brain hemispheres have difficulty understanding other people's complex emotions and thoughts, even though their basic reasoning skills remain intact.
- Does depression severity affect how we read social cues?
People currently experiencing severe depression and anxiety struggle more to interpret social cues, but those in remission perform similarly to healthy individuals.
- Does smelling anxiety change how we feel when left out?
Smelling another person's sweat collected during an anxious situation reduces brain activity in areas typically associated with social pain and mentalizing when a person is being excluded from a social game.
- Does practicing meditation improve how we understand others?
People who practice meditation show greater empathy, better emotion recognition, and less hostile social biases than those who do not.
- How do people with Williams syndrome perceive face-like patterns?
Despite their strong social drive, individuals with Williams syndrome struggle to recognize face-like patterns made from food arrangements compared to typically developing peers.
- Does our gender affect how we read body language?
Men and women use different mental processes to understand body language, with men linking movement and emotion together, while women link body language with reading facial expressions.
- Can you tell who an object is for just by watching a hand move?
People could guess, better than chance, whether someone was moving an object for themselves or for a partner just from subtle timing differences in the movement, and those better at reading emotions from eyes were better at it.
- Can 3-year-olds act on false beliefs before they can talk about them?
Three-year-olds opened the door an adult would expect to use based on her false belief, yet in the same trial they failed to say where she thought the toy was.
- How does high schizotypy affect empathy and social thinking?
People with high schizotypy struggle to understand others' emotions and tend to undermentalize, a deficit partially driven by lower cognitive flexibility and inhibition.
- How an imbalance in empathy types relates to mental health
An imbalance between understanding others' emotions and sharing them is linked to distinct mental health symptoms, often driven by how strongly we react to emotions.
- How Face Feedback Drives Learning and Generosity
Receiving feedback through facial expressions makes people more generous and helps them learn social norms better than abstract symbols do.
- Does playing aggressive card games make people more aggressive?
Playing an aggressive card game helps reduce negative emotions and boost positive ones without increasing post-game aggression or aggressive thinking.
- Can the words a word keeps company with give it hidden feelings?
Words that people rate as neutral, but that usually appear next to good or bad words in everyday language, still carry automatic positive or negative associations.
- Does testosterone make men misread a woman's interest?
A dose of testosterone did not make men overestimate a woman's sexual interest overall, but it made their judgments track her friendliness more closely, especially in men who rated themselves as attractive.