Mental States Of Other Individuals Research Articles

The Primate Origins of Human Social Cognition

ABSTRACT The ability to understand the mental states of other individuals is central to human social behavior, yet some theory of mind capacities are shared with other species. Comparisons of theory of mind skills across humans and other primates can provide a critical test of the cognitive prerequisites necessary for different theory of mind skills to emerge. A fundamental difference between humans and non-humans is language: while language may scaffold some developing theory of mind skills in humans, other species do not have similar capacities for or immersion in language. Comparative work can therefore provide a new line of evidence to test the role of language in the emergence of complex social cognition. Here we first provide an overview of the evidence for shared aspects of theory of mind in other primates, and then examine the evidence for apparently human-unique aspects of theory of mind that may be linked to language. We finally contrast different evolutionary processes, such as competition and cooperation, that may have been important for primate social cognition versus human-specific forms of theory of mind. We argue that this evolutionary perspective can help adjudicate between different proposals on the link between human-specific forms of social cognition and language.

Fake snakes uncover chimpanzees' mind-reading ability.

Crockford et al. (2017, Science Advances, 3(11), e1701742) conducted experimental studies in the wild in Africa to investigate the ability of chimpanzees to understand the mental states of other conspecific individuals. Their findings suggest that chimpanzees understand whether or not other individuals are aware of dangers, and they behave differently according to their understanding about the mental states of other individuals.

Mindreading in the Animal Kingdom: Philosophical Controversies

The central issue in the debate on animal minds is the issue of mindreading. This complicated cognitive ability belongs to the key elements of social cognition—as a form of adapting to specific circumstances connected with living in groups, it enables the reading of the mental states of other individuals, e.g. intentions, desires, and beliefs as well as the adaptation of one’s own behavior to this information. The primary purpose of the article is to present the main philosophical controversies which arise in the discussion of whether this ability can be attributed to animals; if so, then to what extent. Philosophical discussions concentrate on methodological issues: alternative interpretational models of animal behavior (mindreading vs reading behavior), anthropomorphism, experimental protocols, and gradeability of mindreading as well as the nature of the mind (thinking).

Characterizing Spitefulness in Terms of the DSM-5 Model of Pathological Personality Traits

Spitefulness refers to the willingness of an individual to incur a cost in order to inflict harm on someone else. Individual differences in spitefulness have been found to be associated with a range of outcomes including aggression and difficulties understanding the mental states of other individuals. The purpose of the present studies was to examine the associations that spitefulness had with pathological personality traits in order to expand what is known about the nomological network of spitefulness. Study 1 examined the connections between spitefulness and pathological personality traits captured by the brief form of the Personality Inventory for the DSM-5 (PID-5-BF) in 1836 undergraduates. Study 2 examined the associations that spitefulness had with pathological personality traits captured by the PID-5 in 414 community members. Across these two studies, spitefulness was found to have consistent positive associations with the pathological personality traits of antagonism (β = .32 in Study 1 and β = .28 in Study 2) and disinhibition (β = .12 in Study 1 and β = .29 in Study 2). Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for the understanding of spitefulness.

Cognitive Load Disrupts Implicit Theory-of-Mind Processing

Eye movements in Sally-Anne false-belief tasks appear to reflect the ability to implicitly monitor the mental states of other individuals (theory of mind, or ToM). It has recently been proposed that an early-developing, efficient, and automatically operating ToM system subserves this ability. Surprisingly absent from the literature, however, is an empirical test of the influence of domain-general executive processing resources on this implicit ToM system. In the study reported here, a dual-task method was employed to investigate the impact of executive load on eye movements in an implicit Sally-Anne false-belief task. Under no-load conditions, adult participants displayed eye movement behavior consistent with implicit belief processing, whereas evidence for belief processing was absent for participants under cognitive load. These findings indicate that the cognitive system responsible for implicitly tracking beliefs draws at least minimally on executive processing resources. Thus, even the most low-level processing of beliefs appears to reflect a capacity-limited operation.

Emotional conflict in interpersonal interactions

Facial displays of emotions can help to infer the mental states of other individuals. However, the expectations we generate on the basis of people's emotions can mismatch their actual behaviour in certain circumstances, which generates conflict. In the present study, we explored the neural mechanisms of emotional conflict during interpersonal interactions. Participants had to accept or reject economic offers made by several partners who displayed emotional expressions. On every trial, a cue informed participants of whether they could trust the emotion of their partner or not. Trustworthy (low-conflict) partners with happy facial expressions were cooperative and those with angry expressions did not cooperate. Untrustworthy (high-conflict) partners, on the other hand, cooperated when their expression was angry and did not cooperate when they displayed a happy emotion. Behavioural responses were faster for trustworthy than for untrustworty partners. High-conflict partners activated the anterior cingulate and the anterior insula. In turn, trustworthy partners were associated with activations in the left precuneus. Our results suggest that the emotion displayed by another person affects our decision-making in social contexts. When emotional expressions are linked to their natural consequences, they engage ToM processes. In contrast, untrustworthy emotional expressions engage conflict-related brain regions.

Sense of agency and mentalizing: Dissociation of subdomains of social cognition in patients with schizophrenia

The sense of agency, i.e., the sense that “I am the one who is causing an action”, and mentalizing, the ability to understand the mental states of other individuals, are key domains of social cognition. It has been hypothesized that an intact sense of agency is an important precondition for higher-level mentalizing abilities. A substantial body of evidence shows that both processes rely on similar brain areas and are severely impaired in schizophrenia, suggesting a close link between agency and mentalizing. Yet this relationship has not been explicitly tested. We investigated 40 individuals with schizophrenia and 40 healthy controls on an agency and mentalizing task. On the agency task, participants carried out simple mouse movements and judged the partially manipulated visual feedback as either self- or other-generated. On the mentalizing task, participants inferred mental states from pictures that depicted others' eyes (“Reading the mind in the eyes test”). Neuropsychological, psychopathological and social functioning levels were also evaluated. Both sense of agency and mentalizing were impaired in schizophrenia patients compared to healthy controls. However, testing for a relationship revealed no significant correlations between the two processes, either in the schizophrenia or the control group. The present findings demonstrate a dissociation of agency and mentalizing deficits in schizophrenia, suggesting that the multifaceted construct of social cognition consists of independent subdomains in healthy and psychiatrically ill individuals.

Testing Predictions From Personality Neuroscience

We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Extraversion covaried with volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in processing reward information. Neuroticism covaried with volume of brain regions associated with threat, punishment, and negative affect. Agreeableness covaried with volume in regions that process information about the intentions and mental states of other individuals. Conscientiousness covaried with volume in lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in planning and the voluntary control of behavior. These findings support our biologically based, explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality neuroscience (i.e., the systematic study of individual differences in personality using neuroscience methods) as a discipline.

Grundsätzliches zur Konzeption einer evolutionären Psychiatrie

Phenomenological, biological and aspects of psychiatric disorders lack an integrative metatheoretical framework. This paper reviews the foundations of evolutionary psychiatry. Many aspects of evolutionary psychiatry are largely based on the fitness theory. Since many biologists argue that the unit of selection is the gene rather than the single organism or a group of organisms, the of inclusive fitness embraces the fitness of an individual plus the fitness of his or her close relatives with whom the individual on average shares a calculable proportion of genes, depending on how close the relationship actually is. Reciprocal altruism, parental investment in relation to sexual selection, and parent-offspring conflict constitute specific problems that guide the evolution of psychological mechanisms and strategies of an organism especially in terms of its behaviour. Such problems have probably contributed to the evolution of the human social brain that developed in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness to solve problems of adaptive significance of ancestral conditions. Despite this seemingly gene-centred view, evolutionary psychiatry may be understood as a metatheory to integrate genetic understanding and causal explanation of psychopathological processes, including neurobiological and psychological findings, because it takes both, the ultimate and the proximate level of evolved cognitive capacities, emotion and behaviour, into account. Many psychiatric disorders may therefore be considered as dysfunctions of the social brain. This could be exemplified by disorders that are characterised by a compromised capacity for inferring the mental states of other individuals, referred to as theory of mind. In real-life situations mental state attribution usually interferes with affective cues which is, for instance, crucial for experience and behaving empathetically. In many severe psychiatric disorders the lack of empathy may therefore at least in part explain why the competence of patients suffering from schizophrenia, for example, is reduced. Although gender-specific differences in prevalence rates and symptomatology of psychiatric disorders are mentioned in the diagnostic manuals of psychiatric disorders to some extent, it is widely underrecognised that some of these differences emerged due to divergent problems of adaptation for men and women. Likewise, some concepts of psychoanalytic such as the Oedipus complex are inconsistent with evolutionary psychiatry. From an evolutionary point of view there is no such conflict between offspring and same-sex parent, however, parents and offspring disagree over the amount of parental investment, e.g. in terms of resource allocation and investment in potential other offspring. Many insights from evolutionary psychology and psychiatry are therefore also therapeutically neglected but may open new opportunities for empirical research.