Cognitive Perspective-taking Research Articles

PERSPECTIVE-TAKING DECLINE IN OLDER ADULTS WITH AND WITHOUT SUBJECTIVE COGNITIVE DECLINE

Abstract Subjective cognitive decline (SCD), a self-reported decline in cognitive function without objective cognitive decline, is an early risk marker of pathological aging (Jessen et al., 2020). Healthy older adults with SCD(+) were found to have lower objective cognition and increased rates of cognitive decline compared to those without SCD(-) (Morrison & Oliver, 2023). Cognitively-healthy older adults (OA) had shown a decline in perspective-taking abilities compared to younger adults (YA). However, little research has examined whether self-report SCD plays a role in such age-related declines. We examined age-related changes in perspective-taking abilities in OA with and without SCD vis-à-vis YA. Participants were 25 YA (Mage=22.44, range=20-27), 27 SCD- (Mage=68.67, range=60-77), and 20 SCD+ (Mage=66.55, range=60-72). OA were categorized as SCD-/SCD+ based on SCD-Questionnaire (Rami, 2014). SCD- and SCD+ groups were comparable in general cognition (Montreal Cognitive Assessment; p=.91). Participants completed the “owl” task assessing visual perspective-taking (VPT) and the “director” task assessing cognitive perspective-taking (CPT). Kruskal-Wallis tests revealed that YA outperformed OA (Zs>3.52, ps<.001) in VPT, with no significant difference between SCD- and SCD+ (Z=1.27, p=.21). Surprisingly, both YA and SCD+ were better than SCD- in CPT (Zs>2.34, ps<.04), and SCD+ did not differ significantly from YA (Z=0.02, p=.99). Our results suggest that while visual perspective-taking may decline with age regardless of SCD, cognitive perspective-taking may be preserved in older adults with SCD. SCD(+) may signal a hyperawareness of cognitive states in self and others, which in turn stimulate better cognitive perspective-taking. Implications of SCD on social cognition will be discussed.

Existential reflection and morality

This paper presents a series of three studies describing how reading literature promotes empathy and moral outcomes. We add three contrasts to this field of empirical study: (a) an explanatory and interpretative form of narrative reading engagement (Integrative Comprehension) is contrasted with an expressive and explicative form of aesthetic reading engagement (Expressive Enactment); (b) an explanatory and interpretive form of cognitive perspective-taking (a component of Integrative Comprehension) is distinguished from an expressive and explicative form of empathy (a component of Expressive Enactment); and (c) a local form of moral outcome (involving changes in attitude toward a specific group or outgroup) is distinguished from a global form of moral outcome (involving an inclusive respect for human subjectivity). These contrasts are clarified and contextualized within existential-phenomenological discussions of sense-giving lived experience, agency, and morality. In conclusion, we offer a framework that specifies the potential impact on wellbeing of a form of literary reading that involves existential reflection, especially as conceived within the emerging field of existential positive psychology.

Collaborative Playlist-Making: Musical Interaction via Digitally Mediated Co-Curation

Collaborative playlist-making (CPM), a form of music co-curation where two or more people select and order recorded music together, is a form of group musical engagement that has recently risen to prominence among musicians and nonmusicians in the general population. This paper presents CPM as a form of technologically mediated group musical engagement and informs researchers as to how CPM and its constituent behaviors may be studied in relation to other forms of musical engagement, particularly group music-making. In addition, specific psychological processes expected to be elicited by CPM—self-other merging, cognitive perspective-taking, and shared intentionality—are explicated in an effort to evince how CPM may give rise to socio-cognitive transfer effects in line with Goldman's reconstructive route to empathy. The main purpose of this paper is to promote music psychologists’ study of CPM to probe how musical interaction occurring within everyday contexts can harness music's potential to facilitate communication and bring about social benefits.

Do you perceive that people empathize with you when you perceive that they took your perspective?: Distinguishing affective perspective-taking from cognitive perspective-taking

Do you perceive that people empathize with you when you perceive that they took your perspective?: Distinguishing affective perspective-taking from cognitive perspective-taking

Creepy, but Persuasive: In a Virtual Consultation, Physician Bedside Manner, Rather than the Uncanny Valley, Predicts Adherence

Care for chronic disease requires patient adherence to treatment advice. Nonadherence worsens health outcomes and increases healthcare costs. When healthcare professionals are in short supply, a virtual physician could serve as a persuasive technology to promote adherence. However, acceptance of advice may be hampered by the uncanny valley effect—a feeling of eeriness elicited by human simulations. In a hypothetical virtual doctor consultation, 441 participants assumed the patient’s role. Variables from the stereotype content model and the heuristic–systematic model were used to predict adherence intention and behavior change. This 2 × 5 between-groups experiment manipulated the doctor’s bedside manner—either good or poor—and virtual depiction at five levels of realism. These independent variables were designed to manipulate the doctor’s level of warmth and eeriness. In hypothesis testing, depiction had a nonsignificant effect on adherence intention and diet and exercise change, even though the 3-D computer-animated versions of the doctor (i.e., animation, swapped, and bigeye) were perceived as eerier than the others (i.e., real and cartoon). The low-warmth, high-eeriness doctor prompted heuristic processing of information, while the high-warmth doctor prompted systematic processing. This pattern contradicts evidence reported in the persuasion literature. For the stereotype content model, a path analysis found that good bedside manner increased the doctor’s perceived warmth significantly, which indirectly increased physical activity. For the heuristic–systematic model, the doctor’s eeriness, measured in a pretest, had no significant effect on adherence intention and physical activity, while good bedside manner increased both significantly. Surprisingly, cognitive perspective-taking was a stronger predictor of change in physical activity than adherence intention. Although virtual characters can elicit the uncanny valley effect, their effect on adherence intention and physical activity was comparable to a video of a real person. This finding supports the development of virtual consultations.

Racism in Pain Medicine: We Can and Should Do More

Racism in Pain Medicine: We Can and Should Do More

Social priming or not? Investigating generalizability via individual variation

Although the effects of social priming-where social information about a speaker influences linguistic decisions-have long been accepted (e.g., Niedzielski, 1999; Strand, 1999; Hay et al., 2006), recent studies call attention to a lack of generalizability across contexts (e.g., Lawrence, 2015; Chang, 2017; Walker et al., 2019). The current study finds that social priming, in the case of /a℧/-raising in Michigan and Canadian English, is primarily observed for individuals who scored high on both stereotype awareness and cognitive perspective-taking, suggesting that aspects of both the sociolinguistic context and participant sampling can impact when and why social priming effects do not occur.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

Reviewed by: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal John Skalko Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 340 pp. Frans de Waal's 2016 Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? is an exciting read into the baffling and brilliant world of what goes on inside non-human animal heads. Given the sheer number of studies published in the late twentieth century on animal cognition, de Waal does an amazing job presenting many of them in a highly readable fashion with just enough detail to understand the importance and rigorous facets of the research (or in some cases not so rigorous), but without making the detail overwhelming. The extensive bibliography at the end of the book provides ample material for any curious reader interested in further research regarding any of the scientific studies. Much of what is presented in the book would present a big challenge for any contemporary Cartesians who may hold, as Descartes did, that animals are mere automata. If non-human animals are self-moving machines devoid of cognition, then how do chimpanzees learn to stack boxes high enough to reach objects overhead? De Waal tells the famous story of Sultan the chimpanzee who accomplished such a feat without any prior training or teaching (65). Further, if non-human animals have no emotions, then what of the two bottlenose dolphins who came to the rescue of a third after the explosion of a stick of dynamite (133)? De Waal's book presents many challenges for the Cartesian mechanistic view of animals. Most people today, however, need not be persuaded that that the Cartesian view is wrong. On a popular level the overwhelming view is that there is no significant difference in kind between the cognition of non-human [End Page 309] animals and that of man. It is this view that de Waal himself espouses throughout the book, and for which he provides much evidence, although at times his phrasing sounds a bit like dogmatic worship of Darwin. Nevertheless, if Darwin is right, he is right. And given the contemporary biological and psychological courses of study, Darwin appears to be the most reasonable view. But an older, middle view, between the extremes of Cartesian automata and Darwinian cognitivism has been forgotten by many scholars. This is the view of the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle held a more nuanced view of animal cognition: animals are not mere machines devoid of cognitive states, but neither do they possess all of the same kind of mental faculties that man has—"In all animals other than man there is no thinking or calculation but only imagination."1 In the footsteps of Aristotle, Avicenna and Aquinas also did much to develop a rich account of animal cognition. De Waal seems to be completely unaware of the middle ground of the Aristotelians concerning animal cognition. Most of the case studies de Waal mentions remain perfectly compatible with the Aristotelian tradition (albeit, perhaps in its more developed forms): ravens have cognitive perspective-taking (147–48); apes imitate other apes (153–54); thrushes cognize ahead in gathering food for their young (205–6); rats remember in which part of a maze they encountered chocolate before (211); and wasps recognize the faces of other wasps (70–71). But various challenges remain for the Aristotelian. De Waal provides various cases of what he takes to be reasoning in non-human animals. Many of these cases are not reasoning in the Aristotelian sense: reasoning (for the Aristotelian) is coming to know another proposition from two prior propositions that are known. De Waal mentions Sadie, a chimpanzee who could cognize when a box had a fruit in it and when another box did not: [The experimenters] placed an apple in one [box] and a banana in another. After a few minutes of distraction, Sadie saw one of the experimenters munching on either an apple or a banana. This experimenter then left, and Sadie was released to inspect the boxes. She faced an interesting dilemma, since she had not seen how the experimenter had gotten...

Benarkah anak prasekolah sudah mampu mengambil perspektif dalam perilaku prososial?

Previous studies suggested that preschoolers have already behaved prosocially. However,there is a possibility that such insight cannot be generalized since there is a conflictingassumption between different theoretical perspectives. The research aimed to explorewhether pre-schoolers’ perspective-taking in the context of prosocial behavior had developed.Our participants were 25 preschoolers who were 5-6 years old. The result showed that fromthe three types of perspective-taking, which were perceptual, cognitive, and affectiveperspective-taking, affective perspective-taking was undeveloped optimally among themajority of pre-schoolers. They had difficulty when identified others’ emotions in the context,especially in prosocial situations. For cognitive perspective-taking, preschoolers understoodother people’s thoughts, intentions, and motives, but only when the environmental cues weresimple. When the situation was more complex, their efforts to understand other people’sthoughts, intentions, or motives resulting in different understanding about the situations.Preschoolers’ ability to do perceptual perspective-taking had developed. They could shift theirperceptual perspective-taking from themselves to other perceptual perspective-taking. Theresults can be used as a reference for developing intervention programs to improveperspective-taking skills in contexts of prosocial behavior in preschool children.

Dissociating Empathy From Perspective-Taking: Evidence From Intra- and Inter-Individual Differences Research.

Humans have the capacity to share others' emotions, be they positive or negative. Elicited by the observed or imagined emotion of another person, an observer develops a similar emotional state herself. This capacity, empathy, is one of the pillars of social understanding and interaction as it creates a representation of another's inner, mental state. Empathy needs to be dissociated from other social emotions and, crucially, also from cognitive mechanisms of understanding others, the ability to take others' perspective. Here, we describe the conceptual distinctions of these constructs and review behavioral and neural evidence that dissociates them. The main focus of the present review lies on the intraindividual changes in empathy and perspective-taking across the lifespan and on interindividual differences on subclinical and clinical levels. The data show that empathy and perspective-taking recruit distinct neural circuits and can be discerned already during early and throughout adult development. Both capacities also vary substantially between situations and people. Differences can be systematically related to situational characteristics as well as personality traits and mental disorders. The clear distinction of affect sharing from other social emotions like compassion and from cognitive perspective-taking, argues for a clear-cut terminology to describe these constructs. In our view, this speaks against using empathy as an umbrella term encompassing all affective and cognitive routes to understanding others. Unifying the way we speak about these phenomena will help to further research on their underlying mechanisms, psychopathological alterations, and plasticity in training and therapy.

Intermediate states of literariness

Abstract This study utilizes texts which sit between the literary and non-literary to explore the outcomes and mechanisms of literariness. Literariness can be activated by (a) linguistic foregrounding and (b) paratextual specification. In a 2 × 2 design, manipulated versions of two soldier narratives were produced (poetry/fiction; poetry/fact; prose/fiction; prose/poetry). 215 participants were randomly assigned to read one of the textual versions and respond to rating scales dealing with perception of textual features, empathy, sympathy, and cognitive perspective-taking. The results show that poetic form elicits significantly higher ratings for empathy and sympathy and that paratextual information specifying that a text is factual elicits significantly higher ratings for empathy and cognitive perspective-taking. Two structural equation models were defined: (a) a literariness model and (b) a factual accuracy model. The results suggest an additive dual model of processing in which both poetic form and factual definition contribute to outcomes characteristic of literariness. These results offer some support for the hypotheses of the Neuro-Cognitive Poetics Model proposed by (Jacobs, 2011).

Cognitive and Affective Perspective-Taking: Evidence for Shared and Dissociable Anatomical Substrates.

Perspective-taking refers to the ability to recognize another person's point of view. Crucial to the development of interpersonal relationships and prosocial behavior, perspective-taking is closely linked to human empathy, and like empathy, perspective-taking is commonly subdivided into cognitive and affective components. While the two components of empathy have been frequently compared, the differences between cognitive and affective perspective-taking have been under-investigated in the cognitive neuroscience literature to date. Here, we define cognitive perspective-taking as the ability to infer an agent's thoughts or beliefs, and affective perspective-taking as the ability to infer an agent's feelings or emotions. In this paper, we review data from functional imaging studies in healthy adults as well as behavioral and structural imaging studies in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia in order to determine if there are distinct neural correlates for cognitive and affective perspective-taking. Data suggest that there are both shared and non-shared cognitive and anatomic substrates. For example, while both types of perspective-taking engage regions such as the temporoparietal junction, precuneus, and temporal poles, only affective perspective-taking engages regions within the limbic system and basal ganglia. Differences are also observed in prefrontal cortex: while affective perspective-taking engages ventromedial prefrontal cortex, cognitive perspective-taking engages dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). To corroborate these findings, we also examine if cognitive and affective perspective-taking share the same relationship with executive functions. While it is clear that affective perspective-taking requires emotional substrates that are less prominent in cognitive perspective-taking, it remains unknown to what extent executive functions (including working memory, mental set switching, and inhibitory control) may contribute to each process. Overall results indicate that cognitive perspective-taking is dependent on executive functioning (particularly mental set switching), while affective perspective-taking is less so. We conclude with a critique of the current literature, with a focus on the different outcome measures used across studies and misconceptions due to imprecise terminology, as well as recommendations for future research.

The relationship between visual, cognitive, and affective perspective-taking by reading ability in deaf children

The relationship between visual, cognitive, and affective perspective-taking by reading ability in deaf children

Functional MRI examination of empathy for pain in people with schizophrenia reveals abnormal activation related to cognitive perspective-taking but typical activation linked to affective sharing.

Schizophrenia is associated with important disturbances in empathy that are related to everyday functioning. Empathy is classically defined as including affective (sharing others' emotions) and cognitive (taking others' cognitive perspectives) processes. In healthy individuals, studies on empathy for pain revealed specific brain systems associated with these sets of processes, notably the anterior middle cingulate (aMCC) and anterior insula (AI) for affective sharing and the bilateral temporoparietal junction (TPJ) for the cognitive processes, but the integrity of these systems in patients with schizophrenia remains uncertain. Patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls performed a pain empathy task while undergoing fMRI scanning. Participants observed pictures of hands in either painful or nonpainful situations and rated the level of pain while imagining either themselves (self) or an unknown person (other) in these situations. We included 27 patients with schizophrenia and 21 healthy controls in our analyses. For the pain versus no pain contrast, patients showed overall typical activation patterns in the aMCC and AI, with only a small part of the aMCC showing reduced activation compared with controls. For the other versus self contrast, patients showed an abnormal modulation of activation in the TPJ bilaterally (extending to the posterior superior temporal sulcus, referred to as the TPJ/pSTS). The design included an unnecessary manipulation of the visual perspective that reduced the number of trials for analysis. The sample size may not account for the heterogeneity of schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia showed relatively intact brain activation when observing others' pain, but showed abnormalities when asked to take the cognitive perspectives of others.

Contributions of Neuroscience to a New Empathy Epistemology: Implications for Developmental Training

The difficulty in comprehending the epistemology of empathy lies in shifting paradigms which have resulted in empathy being viewed as vague and elusive. Such elusive understanding of empathy has confused research, practice, and advancement of therapeutic principles. Empathy is the core of all social and intellectual transformation. Humankind is biologically programmed to use empathy for survival, health, and well-being. Pursuing and understanding empathy frees human capacity for wisdom. Studying the epistemology of empathy is operationally and scientifically relevant in the synthesis of an empathic practice theory. Clear epistemic definition and neuroscience provide the foundation for an expanding discovery of rational frameworks for a clinician’s empathic training and teaching. A clinician’s empathic ability requires competency in reflective, global, affective, cognitive, and interpersonal perspective-taking. Once understood, renewed curriculum for teaching and training are recommended that would produce more finite outcomes. Epistemic review culminates in empathy skills training over the course of curricula at the undergraduate (BSW) and graduate (MSW) levels.

Changes in visual perspective influence brain activity patterns during cognitive perspective-taking of other people's pain

Empathy refers to our capacity to share and understand the emotional states of others. It relies on two main processes according to existing models: an effortless affective sharing process based on neural resonance and a more effortful cognitive perspective-taking process enabling the ability to imagine and understand how others feel in specific situations. Until now, studies have focused on factors influencing the affective sharing process but little is known about those influencing the cognitive perspective-taking process and the related brain activations during vicarious pain. In the present fMRI study, we used the well-known physical pain observation task to examine whether the visual perspective can influence, in a bottom-up way, the brain regions involved in taking others’ cognitive perspective to attribute their level of pain. We used a pseudo-dynamic version of this classic task which features hands in painful or neutral daily life situations while orthogonally manipulating: (1) the visual perspective with which hands were presented (first-person versus third-person conditions) and (2) the explicit instructions to imagine oneself or an unknown person in those situations (Self versus Other conditions). The cognitive perspective-taking process was investigated by comparing Other and Self conditions. When examined across both visual perspectives, this comparison showed no supra-threshold activation. Instead, the Other versus Self comparison led to a specific recruitment of the bilateral temporo-parietal junction when hands were presented according to a first-person (but not third-person) visual perspective. The present findings identify the visual perspective as a factor that modulates the neural activations related to cognitive perspective-taking during vicarious pain and show that this complex cognitive process can be influenced by perceptual stages of information processing.

ID 522 – Neural substrates of cognitive and affective perspective-taking in schizophrenia: A meta-analysis

Introduction Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder and patients suffering from this disorder have difficulties in daily functioning and social interactions. These difficulties are better explained by deficit in social cognition than by general neurocognitive deficit. Method We meta-analyzed neuroimaging studies involving perspective-taking tasks in schizophrenia using seed-based d Mapping. The perspective taking of affective and cognitive mental states were considered separately. Results Processing of cognitive mental states in people with schizophrenia, compared to healthy controls, were associated with hyperactivation in left temporo-parietal junction, left temporal lobe, and bilateral prefrontal areas and hypoactivation in medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, right temporal lobes, insula and left cuneus. Similarly, processing of affective mental states were associated with hyperactivation in primary somatosensory cortex, prefrontal cortex and left cuneus, and hypoactivation in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate. In addition, the abnormal brain activation in schizophrenia was present also when no deficit in behavioral performance was found. Summary People with schizophrenia showed abnormal activation in areas associated with perspective-taking. The findings supports the idea the deficit in social cognition in schizophrenia has biological nature and that it is connected to both affective and cognitive aspects of perspective-taking.

Cognitive and affective perspective-taking in girls with conduct problems as a function of the callous-unemotional personality feature

Do girls with conduct problems (CP) and callous-unemotional (CU) traits show specific deficits in perspective-taking (PT) compared to healthy girls? We examined cognitive and affective PT in girls with CP and high CU scores (SVP-CU+), girls with CP and low CU-scores (SVP-CU-), and a healthy control group (KG) using a video sequence task and the animated shapes task. The sample consisted of 59 girls aged 8;6 to 16; 11 years. The groups did not differ in affective or in cognitive PT. The results emphasize the necessity of studies of PT in girls with CP and CU traits that account for differences in age ,and gender.

Heartfelt empathy? No association between interoceptive awareness, questionnaire measures of empathy, reading the mind in the eyes task or the director task.

Interoception, defined as afferent information arising from within the body, is the basis of all emotional experience and underpins the ‘self.’ However, people vary in the extent to which interoceptive signals reach awareness. This trait modulates both their experience of emotion and their ability to distinguish ‘self’ from ‘other’ in multisensory contexts. The experience of emotion and the degree of self/other distinction or overlap are similarly fundamental to empathy, which is an umbrella term comprising affect sharing, empathic concern and perspective-taking (PT). A link has therefore often been assumed between interoceptive awareness (IA) and empathy despite a lack of clear evidence. To test the hypothesis that individual differences in both traits should correlate, we measured IA in four experiments, using a well-validated heartbeat perception task, and compared this with scores on several tests that relate to various aspects of empathy. We firstly measured scores on the Index of Interpersonal Reactivity and secondly on the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy. Thirdly, because the ‘simulationist’ account assumes that affect sharing is involved in recognizing emotion, we employed the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task’ for the recognition of facial expressions. Contrary to expectation, we found no significant relationships between IA and any aspect of these measures. This striking lack of direct links has important consequences for hypotheses about the extent to which empathy is necessarily embodied. Finally, to assess cognitive PT ability, which specifically requires self/other distinction, we used the ‘Director Task’ but found no relationship. We conclude that the abilities that make up empathy are potentially related to IA in a variety of conflicting ways, such that a direct association between IA and various components of empathy has yet to be established.

A job interview in the MRI scanner: How does indirectness affect addressees and overhearers?

In using language, people not only exchange information, but also navigate their social world – for example, they can express themselves indirectly to avoid losing face. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated the neural correlates of interpreting face-saving indirect replies, in a situation where participants only overheard the replies as part of a conversation between two other people, as well as in a situation where the participants were directly addressed themselves. We created a fictional job interview context where indirect replies serve as a natural communicative strategy to attenuate one’s shortcomings, and asked fMRI participants to either pose scripted questions and receive answers from three putative job candidates (addressee condition) or to listen to someone else interview the same candidates (overhearer condition). In both cases, the need to evaluate the candidate ensured that participants had an active interest in comprehending the replies. Relative to direct replies, face-saving indirect replies increased activation in medial prefrontal cortex, bilateral temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral middle temporal gyrus, in active overhearers and active addressees alike, with similar effect size, and comparable to findings obtained in an earlier passive listening study (Bašnáková et al., 2014). In contrast, indirectness effects in bilateral anterior insula and pregenual ACC, two regions implicated in emotional salience and empathy, were reliably stronger in addressees than in active overhearers. Our findings indicate that understanding face-saving indirect language requires additional cognitive perspective-taking and other discourse-relevant cognitive processing, to a comparable extent in active overhearers and addressees. Furthermore, they indicate that face-saving indirect language draws upon affective systems more in addressees than in overhearers, presumably because the addressee is the one being managed by a face-saving reply. In all, face-saving indirectness provides a window on the cognitive as well as affect-related neural systems involved in human communication.