Content In Social Cognition Research Articles

Aging in cognitive control of social processing: evidence from the attention network test

ABSTRACT Aging seems to be associated with impairment of attentional network functioning. It is not known whether social information can modulate this age-related decline. We used three variants of Attention Network test to examine the age-related decline of attentional effects in response to stimuli with and without social-cognitive content. Three groups of younger, middle-aged, and older participants performed the ANT, using fish, drawings, or photographs of faces looking to the left or right as target and flanker stimuli. The results showed that both executive attention and alerting were more resistant to the age-related decline with social stimuli and that orienting attention scores showed a progressive increase with age in the presence of this kind of stimuli. These findings underline the importance of social information in modulating and contrasting the age-related decline and support the status of human faces as a special class of visual stimuli for the human attentional systems.

Agentic Thinking About Others Makes Them Closer

Abstract A substantial amount of research showed that agency (concerning goal attainment) and communion (concerning relationships maintenance) are two basic dimensions of content in social cognition. Based on the well-supported idea that people typically think about themselves and close others in agentic rather than communal terms, we tested the hypothesis that agentic (but not communal) thinking about unknown others makes them subjectively closer. This hypothesis was confirmed in four experiments differently priming agentic versus communal thinking on others. As predicted, increases in closeness resulting from the agentic thinking about others were constrained to cognitive load conditions where participants were occupied with a parallel task. We conclude that the agentic content of thoughts about others serves as an intuitive, heuristic cue of their psychological closeness.

Attention network test — The impact of social information on executive control, alerting and orienting

According to the attention network approach, attention is best understood in terms of three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct networks — alerting, orienting, and executive attention. An important question is whether social information influences the efficiency of these networks. Using the same structure as the Attentional Network Test (ANT), we developed a variant of this test to examine attentional effects in response to stimuli with and without social-cognitive content. Fish, drawings or photographs of faces looking to the left or right were used as target stimuli. Results collected from twenty-four university students showed that photographs of faces positively affected attentional orienting and executive control, whereas reduced the efficiency of alerting, as compared to both face drawings and fish. These results support the status of human faces as a special class of visual stimuli for the human attentional systems.

Fairy Stories and Children's Developing Theories of Mind

Abstract Traditional fairy tales are still popular stories for young children. This paper examines the social cognitive content of two well known fairy stories: ‘Rumpelstilt‐skin’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Analysis focuses on the internal state vocabulary contained in these stories, i.e., language which refers to intentions, cognitions and feeling states (Bretherton and Beeghly, 1981) and the demands that they place on children's ability to attribute psychological states. These two aspects are discussed within the context of what we know about children's developing ‘theories of mind’.

Structure and Content in Social Cognition: Conceptual and Empirical Analyses

Structure and Content in Social Cognition: Conceptual and Empirical Analyses