People's Mental States Research Articles

Emotion recognition, ‘theory of mind,’ and social behavior in schizophrenia

Several studies have demonstrated that patients with schizophrenia are impaired in recognizing emotions from facial expressions and in appreciating other people's mental states—the latter commonly referred to as ‘theory of mind.’ The question as to how social cognitive skills relate to patients' actual social behavior is, however, largely unanswered. This study examined emotion recognition, ‘theory of mind,’ and social behavior in schizophrenia. Emotion recognition, ‘theory of mind,’ executive functioning, ‘crystallized’ verbal intelligence, psychopathology, and social behavior were assessed in patients with schizophrenia compared with a healthy control group. Patients were significantly impaired on all tasks involving executive functioning, emotion recognition, and ‘theory of mind.’ Impaired executive functioning did, however, only partially account for the deficits in social perception and social cognition. Social perception and cognition in schizophrenia predicted the odds of being a patient significantly better than nonsocial cognition. Severe social behavioral abnormalities were linked to the duration of the illness, and even more so to ‘theory of mind’ deficits. Considering impaired social perception and social cognition significantly contributes to the understanding of social behavioral problems in schizophrenia.

Understanding children's and adults' limitations in mental state reasoning

<h2>Abstract</h2> Young children exhibit several deficits in reasoning about their own and other people's mental states. We propose that these deficits, along with more subtle limitations in adults' social-cognitive reasoning, are all manifestations of the same cognitive bias. This is the ‘curse of knowledge' – a tendency to be biased by one's own knowledge when attempting to appreciate a more naı̈ve or uninformed perspective. We suggest the developmental differences in mental state reasoning exist because the strength of this bias diminishes with age, not because of a conceptual change in how young children understand mental states. By pointing out the common denominator in children's and adults' limitations in mental state reasoning we hope to provide a unified framework for understanding the nature and development of social cognition.

Understanding children's and adults' limitations in mental state reasoning

Young children exhibit several deficits in reasoning about their own and other people's mental states. We propose that these deficits, along with more subtle limitations in adults' social-cognitive reasoning, are all manifestations of the same cognitive bias. This is the ‘curse of knowledge’ – a tendency to be biased by one's own knowledge when attempting to appreciate a more naı̈ve or uninformed perspective. We suggest the developmental differences in mental state reasoning exist because the strength of this bias diminishes with age, not because of a conceptual change in how young children understand mental states. By pointing out the common denominator in children's and adults’ limitations in mental state reasoning we hope to provide a unified framework for understanding the nature and development of social cognition.

Theory of mind, social development, and psychosis.

The difficulty in interpreting other people's mental states found in children with autism and in people affected by schizophrenia may be explained in terms of a unique mental process called Theory of Mind. The paper discusses the main operational issues of such a peculiar aspect of social cognition, the Theory of Mind, and its implication in schizophrenia, including a review of its related neural structures. Theory of Mind abilities may be a relevant aspect of social interaction involving people affected by schizophrenia, and they need to be further investigated in clinical research.

Neuropsychological Impairments and Changes in Emotional and Social Behaviour Following Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Changes in emotional and social behaviour are relatively common following severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Despite the serious consequences of these changes, little is known about the underlying neuropsychological deficits. In this study, we investigated which deficits might underlie these behavioural changes. The emotional and social behaviour of 17 patients with severe TBI was assessed with questionnaires, completed by the patient and a relative. Neuropsychological tests assessed recognition of emotional expressions, understanding of other people's mental states and cognitive fluency. Ratings from patients and relatives revealed changes in emotional and social behaviour after injury. Compared to matched healthy controls, the patients were impaired at recognising facial and vocal expressions of emotions, detecting social faux pas and nonverbal fluency. None of these impairments was significantly associated with the relatives' ratings of behavioural problems following TBI, although the correlation with detecting social faux pas was relatively high (r =-.61).

The Biological Basis of Social Interaction

The fact that brain disorder can impair social interactions in different ways suggests that social competence has multiple components that have foundations in brain systems. The physiological basis of one aspect of social cognition, theory of mind, is just beginning to be understood. Brain-imaging studies suggest that a network of areas linking medial prefrontal and temporal cortex forms the neural substrate of mentalizing, that is, representing one's own and other people's mental states. The medial prefrontal areas are prominent also in tasks that involve self-monitoring, whereas the temporal regions are prominent also in tasks that involve the representation of goals of actions. We speculate that the precursors of mentalizing ability derive from a brain system that evolved for representing agents and actions, and the relationships between them.

Movement and Mind: A Functional Imaging Study of Perception and Interpretation of Complex Intentional Movement Patterns

We report a functional neuroimaging study with positron emission tomography (PET) in which six healthy adult volunteers were scanned while watching silent computer-presented animations. The characters in the animations were simple geometrical shapes whose movement patterns selectively evoked mental state attribution or simple action description. Results showed increased activation in association with mental state attribution in four main regions: medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction (superior temporal sulcus), basal temporal regions (fusiform gyrus and temporal poles adjacent to the amygdala), and extrastriate cortex (occipital gyrus). Previous imaging studies have implicated these regions in self-monitoring, in the perception of biological motion, and in the attribution of mental states using verbal stimuli or visual depictions of the human form. We suggest that these regions form a network for processing information about intentions, and speculate that the ability to make inferences about other people's mental states evolved from the ability to make inferences about other creatures' actions.

Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-reading

A new class of visuomotor neuron has been recently discovered in the monkey's premotor cortex: mirror neurons. These neurons respond both when a particular action is performed by the recorded monkey and when the same action, performed by another individual, is observed. Mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system matching observation and execution of goal-related motor actions. Experimental evidence suggests that a similar matching system also exists in humans. What might be the functional role of this matching system? One possible function is to enable an organism to detect certain mental states of observed conspecifics. This function might be part of, or a precursor to, a more general mind-reading ability. Two different accounts of mind-reading have been suggested. According to `theory theory', mental states are represented as inferred posits of a naive theory. According to `simulation theory', other people's mental states are represented by adopting their perspective: by tracking or matching their states with resonant states of one's own. The activity of mirror neurons, and the fact that observers undergo motor facilitation in the same muscular groups as those utilized by target agents, are findings that accord well with simulation theory but would not be predicted by theory theory.

Cognitive Complexity and Control

In the past 10 to 15 years, an abundance of information about human development has accumu lated rapidly through the reconsid eration of an old question?how do children come to recognize what is indicated by the term mental? The core of this research area, chil dren's theory of mind, studies the development of children's under standing of their own and other people's mental states. An impor tant aspect of the research is that theory of mind explores children's understanding of specific mental states, especially those of belief and desire.

A Psychological Investigation of Meaning in Music

Music has a strong effect on people's mental state and behaviour. This effect can be at a simple motor level, or it can be at a more complex level of arbitrary association or it can be at a much more complex cognitive and representational level. This latter case is of specific interest because it implies that, to some degree, music can be said to have a content that is not musical. Thus, when music is taken to depict a rough sea, then something in the music causes that: the music contains something that is being taken to signify roughness-of-sea. The existence of a large, natural yet arbitrary vocabulary (as is demonstrably the case for language) to relate musical expressions to non-musical events/objects seems implausible. In this paper, the possibility is explored that the vocabulary of musical expression concerns psychological aspects of people. Thus music, it is hypothesised, can express male/female-ness and good/evil-ness and happy/sad-ness and so on. Data obtained in a novel paradigm designed to test this hypothesis are described. Substantial support for the hypothesis is found: the implications of this are discussed.

How Children with Head Injury Represent Real and Deceptive Emotion in Short Narratives

Narratives are not only about events, but also about the emotions those events elicit. Understanding a narrative involves not just the affective valence of implied emotional states, but the formation of an explicit mental representation of those states. In turn, this representation provides a mechanism that particularizes emotion and modulates its display, which then allows emotional expression to be modified according to particular contexts. This includes understanding that a character may feel an emotion but inhibit its display or even express a deceptive emotion. We studied how 59 school-aged children with head injury and 87 normally-developing age-matched controls understand real and deceptive emotions in brief narratives. Children with head injury showed less sensitivity than controls to how emotions are expressed in narratives. While they understood the real emotions in the text, and could recall what provoked the emotion and the reason for concealing it, they were less able than controls to identify deceptive emotions. Within the head injury group, factors such as an earlier age at head injury and frontal lobe contusions were associated with poor understanding of deceptive emotions. The results are discussed in terms of the distinction between emotions as felt and emotions as a cognitive framework for understanding other people's actions and mental states. We conclude that children with head injury understand emotional communication, the spontaneous externalization of real affect, but not emotive communication, the conscious, strategic modification of affective signals to influence others through deceptive facial expressions.

Other Folks' Theories of Mind and Behavior

Our everyday, basic understanding of people's mental states and behaviors has recently been a lively topic of debate in the social sciences This article addresses whether some aspects of our European-American theory of mind are universal, by examining ethnographic and experimental reports of cultural variation Implications of that variation for nativist theories of development are discussed and research strategies to augment our understanding are proposed.

Schizophrenia, symptomatology and social inference: Investigating “theory of mind” in people with schizophrenia

It has been proposed that certain psychotic symptoms associated with schizophrenia reflect a deficit in the ability to appreciate other people's mental states (Frith, 1992). This notion is tested using a newly devised task examining the capacity to infer intentions behind indirect speech. The findings support the notion that some patients with schizophrenia have difficulties with tasks requiring ‘theory of mind’ skills and that this deficiency is symptom specific. The findings are discussed with reference to the cognitive skills which may be involved in the performance of tasks requiring social inferences.

Children's knowledge of the presuppositions of know and other cognitive verbs.

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the development of knowledge about the presuppositions of cognitive verbs that take sentential complements. The verbs included factives, which presuppose the truth of their complements, and nonfactives, which carry no such presupposition. Three tasks assessed children's ability to (a) assign truth values to complements according to the presuppositions of the main verbs; (b) select verbs to describe people's mental states; and (c) state the presuppositions of the verbs in definitions. The results indicated that the presuppositions of the factives know, forget, and remember and the nonfactive think are not learned until age 4. Believe, which has factive and nonfactive properties, is mastered after age 7. The children's performance differed across tasks due to variations in processing requirements.

Reply to Lycan

My paper “On the Indispensability of Intentionality” is faulted on two counts by William Lycan:(i)I fail to show that there are any non-intentional psychological verbs(ii)my argument against eliminative materialism contains a false premiss.I intend to deal swiftly with Lycan's indictment, as I believe it to be patently insubstantial. The aim, in my paper, of pointing out that there are non-intentional psychological verbs was to show that Lycan and others have been mistaken in believing that every psychological verb is intentional.I shall respond first to (ii), to Lycan's charge that the fifth premiss of his reconstruction of my argument against eliminative materalism is false, or at least not obviously true. The premiss reads: “If language takes place, it takes place between persons.” The eliminative materialist can reasonably deny this premiss, Lycan maintains, since it “seems plausible” to predict that we will someday be able to explain, with no reference to people's mental states or activities, what language is and how it works. I believe that because this “prediction” is in fact self-contradictory, it casts no doubt whatsoever on the fifth premiss of my anti-materialist argument.