Representation Of Social Interaction Research Articles

The Role of Sensorimotor Representation in Social Interaction

Emerging grounded cognition contended that the representation and processing of knowledge involved perceptual, somatosensory, and motoric re-experiencing information. In this view, social interaction was grounded in the physical context. For example, temperature changed people’s social feelings and social feelings were understood by temperature. Hence, the representation of social interaction was based on the sensorimotor representation. However, it is still unclear whether and how humans use grounded cognition theory to explain social interaction. In this review, we first introduced some basic viewpoints of grounded cognition and how this theory can be applied in social interaction. Then it explained the universality of grounded cognition theory by comparing some related theories of grounded cognition. Next, by speculating on the causes of the phenomena of grounded cognition in social interaction, it was proved that grounded cognition theory can be well applied to social interaction. In the last part, the advantages and disadvantages of grounded theory in interpreting social interaction are further discussed by comparing conceptual metaphor theory with grounded cognition theory.

Place, Space, and Time in MC Solaar’s American Francophone

Place, Space, and Time in MC Solaar’s American Francophone

Infants’ monitoring of social interactions: The effect of emotional cues.

Relying on information about the emotional state of others is vital for a proper monitoring and representation of social interactions. We tested the impact of vocal emotional cues on 12-month-old infants' monitoring of animated movies that involved the separation of a smaller and a larger oval shape. The separation was accompanied by the sound of either a crying or a laughing baby and was followed either by the return of the larger figure to, or its further separation from, the smaller figure. Eye tracking showed that infants' monitoring pattern was influenced by the type of emotional signal during both the separation phase and the response phase of the animations: During the separation phase infants fixated longer at the larger figure if the separation was accompanied by a crying sound than if laughter could be heard. In the response phase, the influence of the emotional signal depended on the type of response. Infants overall looked more often at the animations during the crying than the laughter sound but only when the larger figure did not return to the smaller figure. These results suggest that infants are able to integrate vocal emotional cues in their representation of observed interactions. Our findings are also discussed in relation to the source of negativity bias in infants' information processing.

The representation of social interaction in episodic memory: A functional MRI study

The representation of social interaction in episodic memory is a critical factor for the successful navigation of social relationships. In general, it is important to separate episodic memory during social interaction from episodic memory during the self-generation of action events. Different cortical representations have been associated with social interaction vs. self-generated episodic memory. Here we clarified the cortical representation of the effect of context (social vs. solitary) on episodic memory by comparing it with the generation effect (self vs. other) on episodic memory. Each participant learned words while engaged in a sentence generation and a reading task, and subsequently each participant was scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they performed a recognition task using the words that had been learned. The experiment was comprised of four conditions and we looked at two situations that involved a social context and non-social (solitary) context task. In the learning session before entering the MRI, two participants collaborated in a social context either generating (social-contextual self-generation condition: SS) or reading (social-contextual other-generation condition: SO) a sequence of sentences alternately to construct a meaningful story narrative. In the non-social context, the participants generated (non-social-contextual self-generation condition: NS) or read (non-social-contextual other-generation condition: NO) a sequence of sentences individually. The stimuli for the recognition session consisted of learned words and novel words. Activation for social context retrieval was identified in the right medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and activation for self-generated retrieval was identified in the left mPFC and the left middle cingulate cortex. These results indicate that dissociable regions within the medial prefrontal cortices contribute to the processes involved in the representation of social interaction, including social context and self-generation in the retrieval of episodic memory.

Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope

Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

Social Networks that Matter: Twitter Under the Microscope

Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the declared set of friends and followers.

A “Jekyll and Hyde” Within

We hypothesized that representations of social interactions in REM and non-REM (NREM) dreams would reflect differing regional brain activation patterns associated with the two sleep states, and that levels of aggressive interactions would be higher in REM than in NREM dreams. One hundred REM, 100 NREM, and 100 wake reports were collected in the home from 8 men and 7 women using the Nightcap sleep-wake mentation-monitoring system and scored for number and variety of social interactions. We found that (a) social interactions were more likely to be depicted in dream than in wake reports, (b) aggressive social interactions were more characteristic of REM than NREM or wake reports, and (c) dreamer-initiated friendliness was more characteristic of NREM than REM reports. We conclude that processing of, or simulations about, selected social interactions is preferentially performed while "off-line" during the dream state, with the REM state specializing in simulation of aggressive interactions and the NREM state specializing in simulation of friendly interactions.

Therapeutic Implications of a Social Interaction Model of Posttraumatic Stress

Out of the many aspects of posttraumatic adaptation the role of self-process is emphasized, where “self” is conceptualized as the representation of social interaction: Not only the “messages” conveyed by others, but also a person's inner response to that messages, forms ongoing self-processes. Traumatic experiences lead to distorted self-processes, to a great extent due to posttraumatic inner dialogues. Therapeutic implications and experiences from Bosnia are discussed, where this model has been applied.