Social Perception Abilities Research Articles

Mentalizing abilities mediate the impact of the basic social perception on negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia

Social cognitive deficits are currently considered as one of the main predictors of clinical symptoms and functional outcome in patients with schizophrenia. Multiple studies have suggested that a two-factor solution (low-level vs. high-level) best describes the structure of social cognitive processes in patients. While higher-order processes have been repeatedly linked to negative symptoms, no such association was found for lower-level processes. Thus, the aim of the current study is to examine whether the association between basic social perception processes and symptoms in patients with schizophrenia is mediated by mentalizing abilities. One hundred thirty-nine patients have completed basic social perception (Communicative Interactions Database task CID-12) and mentalizing (Reading the Mind in the Eyes task) tasks. In line with our hypothesis, we have observed full mediation of the effects of basic social perception abilities on negative symptoms via mentalizing abilities in patients. This effect suggests that, similarly as in the case of positive symptoms, a hierarchical nature of social cognitive processes should be considered while investigating negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

Social decision-making in Parkinson’s disease

ABSTRACT Introduction Parkinson’s Disease (PD) commonly affects cognition and communicative functions, including the ability to perceive socially meaningful cues from nonverbal behavior and spoken language (e.g., a speaker’s tone of voice). However, we know little about how people with PD use social information to make decisions in daily interactions (e.g., decisions to trust another person) and whether this ability rests on intact cognitive functions and executive/decision-making abilities in nonsocial domains. Method Non-demented adults with and without PD were presented utterances that conveyed differences in speaker confidence or politeness based on the way that speakers formulated their statement and their tone of voice. Participants had to use these speech-related cues to make trust-related decisions about interaction partners while playing the Trust Game. Explicit measures of social perception, nonsocial decision-making, and related cognitive abilities were collected. Results Individuals with PD displayed significant differences from control participants in social decision-making; for example, they showed greater trust in game partners whose voice sounded confident and who explicitly stated that they would cooperate with the participant. The PD patients displayed relative intact social perception (speaker confidence or politeness ratings) and were unimpaired on a nonsocial decision-making task (the Dice game). No obvious relationship emerged between measures of social perception, social decision-making, or cognitive functioning in the PD sample. Conclusions Results provide evidence of alterations in decision-making restricted to social contexts in PD individuals with relatively preserved cognition with minimal changes in social perception. Researchers and practitioners interested in how PD affects social perception and cognition should include assessments that emulate social interactions, as non-interactive tasks may fail to detect the full impact of the disease on those affected.

Improving Emotion Perception in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder with Computer-Based Training and Hearing Amplification.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience challenges with social communication, often involving emotional elements of language. This may stem from underlying auditory processing difficulties, especially when incoming speech is nuanced or complex. This study explored the effects of auditory training on social perception abilities of children with ASD. The training combined use of a remote-microphone hearing system and computerized emotion perception training. At baseline, children with ASD had poorer social communication scores and delayed mismatch negativity (MMN) compared to typically developing children. Behavioral results, measured pre- and post-intervention, revealed increased social perception scores in children with ASD to the extent that they outperformed their typically developing peers post-intervention. Electrophysiology results revealed changes in neural responses to emotional speech stimuli. Post-intervention, mismatch responses of children with ASD more closely resembled their neurotypical peers, with shorter MMN latencies, a significantly heightened P2 wave, and greater differentiation of emotional stimuli, consistent with their improved behavioral results. This study sets the foundation for further investigation into connections between auditory processing difficulties and social perception and communication for individuals with ASD, and provides a promising indication that combining amplified hearing and computer-based targeted social perception training using emotional speech stimuli may have neuro-rehabilitative benefits.

Social cognition in cervical dystonia: phenotype and relationship to anxiety and depression.

Anxiety and depression are common disabling comorbidities in cervical dystonia (CD) and may predispose to social withdrawal and social cognitive impairments. The relationship between social cognition and depressive/anxiety symptoms in CD is under-investigated. Forty-six CD patients (40 women; meanage ±SD, 55.57±10.84years) were administered the following social cognition battery: Affect Naming, Prosody Face and Pair Matching subtests from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV and Wechsler Memory Scale IV (social perception), reality-known and reality-unknown false belief reasoning tasks (theory of mind), Empathy Quotient and Social Norms Questionnaire 22 (social behaviour), alongside the Benton Facial Recognition Task (non-emotional facial discrimination). Alongside CD severity, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale measured depressive/anxiety comorbid diagnostic status and severity, and the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale assessed social phobia. Social cognition tasks were standardized using published normative data and a cut-off of z<-1.5 for impairment. More than 90% of our CD patients performed normally on social perception and social behaviour tests. Performance on impaired belief reasoning (theory of mind) was impaired in 10 of 46 (21.74%); five of 46 (10.87%) were impaired on the Empathy Quotient. Better performance on the Affect Naming task was associated with comorbid anxiety (η2 =0.09, medium-to-large effect size) and greater anxiety, depression and social phobia severity. Worse performance on the Empathy Quotient was associated with comorbid depression (η2 =0.11, medium-to-large effect size) and greater depression severity. CD patients had significantly more difficulties with fearful face identification (P<0.001). Greater social perception abilities in CD patients with more severe anxiety and depression suggest efficient modulation and self-adaptation of social cognitive skills.

Early Brain Damage Affects Body Schema and Person Perception Abilities in Children and Adolescents with Spastic Diplegia.

Early brain damage leading to cerebral palsy is associated to core motor impairments and also affects cognitive and social abilities. In particular, previous studies have documented specific alterations of perceptual body processing and motor cognition that are associated to unilateral motor deficits in hemiplegic patients. However, little is known about spastic diplegia (SpD), which is characterized by motorial deficits involving both sides of the body and is often associated to visuospatial, attentional, and social perception impairments. Here, we compared the performance of a sample of 30 children and adolescents with SpD (aged 7-18 years) and of a group of age-matched controls with typical development (TD) at two different tasks tapping on body representations. In the first task, we tested visual and motor imagery abilities as assessed, respectively, by the object-based mental rotation of letters and by the first-person transformations for whole-body stimuli. In the second task, we administered an inversion effect/composite illusion task to evaluate the use of configural/holistic processing of others' body. Additionally, we assessed social perception abilities in the SpD sample using the NEPSY-II battery. In line with previously reported visuospatial deficits, a general mental imagery impairment was found in SpD patients when they were engaged in both object-centered and first-person mental transformations. Nevertheless, a specific deficit in operating an own-body transformation emerged. As concerns body perception, while more basic configural processing (i.e., inversion effect) was spared, no evidence for holistic (i.e., composite illusion) body processing was found in the SpD group. NEPSY-II assessment revealed that SpD children were impaired in both the theory of mind and affect recognition subtests. Overall, these findings suggested that early brain lesions and biased embodied experience could affect higher-level motor cognition and perceptual body processing, thus pointing to a strict link between motor deficits, body schema alterations, and person processing difficulties.

Nasal Oxytocin Treatment Biases Dogs' Visual Attention and Emotional Response toward Positive Human Facial Expressions.

The neuropeptide oxytocin plays a critical role in social behavior and emotion regulation in mammals. The aim of this study was to explore how nasal oxytocin administration affects gazing behavior during emotional perception in domestic dogs. Looking patterns of dogs, as a measure of voluntary attention, were recorded during the viewing of human facial expression photographs. The pupil diameters of dogs were also measured as a physiological index of emotional arousal. In a placebo-controlled within-subjects experimental design, 43 dogs, after having received either oxytocin or placebo (saline) nasal spray treatment, were presented with pictures of unfamiliar male human faces displaying either a happy or an angry expression. We found that, depending on the facial expression, the dogs’ gaze patterns were affected selectively by oxytocin treatment. After receiving oxytocin, dogs fixated less often on the eye regions of angry faces and revisited (glanced back at) more often the eye regions of smiling (happy) faces than after the placebo treatment. Furthermore, following the oxytocin treatment dogs fixated and revisited the eyes of happy faces significantly more often than the eyes of angry faces. The analysis of dogs’ pupil diameters during viewing of human facial expressions indicated that oxytocin may also have a modulatory effect on dogs’ emotional arousal. While subjects’ pupil sizes were significantly larger when viewing angry faces than happy faces in the control (placebo treatment) condition, oxytocin treatment not only eliminated this effect but caused an opposite pupil response. Overall, these findings suggest that nasal oxytocin administration selectively changes the allocation of attention and emotional arousal in domestic dogs. Oxytocin has the potential to decrease vigilance toward threatening social stimuli and increase the salience of positive social stimuli thus making eye gaze of friendly human faces more salient for dogs. Our study provides further support for the role of the oxytocinergic system in the social perception abilities of domestic dogs. We propose that oxytocin modulates fundamental emotional processing in dogs through a mechanism that may facilitate communication between humans and dogs.

Social perception in synaesthesia for colour

ABSTRACTSynaesthesia is a rare phenomenon in which stimulation in one modality (e.g., audition) evokes a secondary percept not associated with the first (e.g., colour). Prior work has suggested links between synaesthesia and other neurodevelopmental conditions that are linked to altered social perception abilities. With this in mind, here we sought to examine social perception abilities in grapheme–colour synaesthesia (where achromatic graphemes evoke colour experiences) by examining facial identity and facial emotion perception in synaesthetes and controls. Our results indicate that individuals who experience grapheme–colour synaesthesia outperformed controls on tasks involving fine visual discrimination of facial identity and emotion, but not on tasks involving holistic face processing. These findings are discussed in the context of broader perceptual and cognitive traits previously associated with synaesthesia for colour, with the suggestion that performance benefits shown by grapheme–colour synaesthetes may be related to domain-general visual discrimination biases observed in this group.

Exploration of older and younger British adults' performance on The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT).

Social perception is an important skill. One assessment that is commonly used to assess social perception abilities is The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT). The only normative data available for this test are for Australian younger adults. Despite no normative data being available for British adults, the test is widely used in the UK with older and younger adults. There is a growing body of research that suggests that older adults have difficulty with skills associated with social perception. There is therefore a need to determine whether British adults, and more specifically British older adults, perform similarly to the Australian normative TASIT scores available in the manual. To explore the differences between older and younger British adults' performance on TASIT, and to determine whether younger and older British adults perform similarly to the data from Australian adults in TASIT manual. TASIT was administered to a total of 42 native British English speaking participants. The participants were split into two age groups 18-45 and 60-90 years. Comparisons were made between the two groups and the Australian data in TASIT manual. The younger British and Australian adults obtained similar scores on all parts of TASIT. The older British adults though, obtained significantly lower scores than the Australian younger adults on all parts of TASIT and when education was controlled for they obtained significantly lower scores than the British younger adults. The findings are discussed in the light of previous research that has found that older adults are worse than younger adults at social inferences. The findings of the current study suggest that caution should be used when using TASIT with older British adults to assess social perception abilities.

Examining and Comparing Social Perception Abilities Across Childhood-Onset Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Several neurodevelopmental disorders are associated with social processing deficits. The objective of this study was to compare patterns of social perception abilities across obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and control participants. A total of 265 children completed the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test-Child Version (RMET). Parents or caregivers completed established trait/symptom scales. The predicted percentage of accuracy on the RMET was compared across disorders and by item difficulty and item valence (i.e., positive/negative/neutral mental states), then analyzed for associations with trait/symptom scores. The percentage of correct RMET scores varied significantly between diagnostic groups (p < .0001). On pairwise group comparisons controlling for age and sex, children with ADHD and ASD scored lower than the other groups (p < .0001). When IQ was also controlled for in the model, participants with OCD performed better than controls (p < .001), although differences between other groups were less pronounced. Participants with ASD scored lowest on easy items. Those with ASD and ADHD scored significantly lower than other groups on items with positive valence (p < .01). Greater social communication impairment and hyperactivity/impulsivity, but not OCD traits/symptoms, were associated with lower scores on the RMET, irrespective of diagnosis. Social perception abilities in neurodevelopmental disorders exist along a continuum. Children with ASD have the greatest deficits, whereas children with OCD may be hypersensitive to social information. Social communication deficits and hyperactive/impulsive traits are associated with impaired social perception abilities; these findings highlight overlapping cognitive and behavioral manifestations across disorders.

The oxytocin receptor gene and social perception

Social perception is an important prerequisite for successful social interaction, because it helps to gain information about behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of interaction partners. Previous pharmacological studies have emphasized the relevance of the oxytocin system for social perception abilities, while knowledge on genetic contributions is still scarce. In the endeavor to fill this gap in the literature, the current study searches for associations between participants’ social perception abilities as measured by the interpersonal perception task (IPT) and the rs2268498 polymorphism on the OXTR-gene, which has repeatedly been linked to processes relevant to social functioning. N = 105 healthy participants were experimentally tested with the IPT and genotyped for the rs2268498 polymorphism. T-allele carriers (TT and TC genotypes) exhibited significantly better performance in the IPT than carriers of the CC-genotype. This difference was also significant for the subscales measuring the strength of social bonding (kinship and intimacy). As in previous studies, T-allele carriers exhibited better performance in measures of social processing indicating that the rs2268498 polymorphism is an important candidate for understanding the genetic basis of social functioning.

Context-Sensitive Affect Recognition for a Robotic Game Companion

Social perception abilities are among the most important skills necessary for robots to engage humans in natural forms of interaction. Affect-sensitive robots are more likely to be able to establish and maintain believable interactions over extended periods of time. Nevertheless, the integration of affect recognition frameworks in real-time human-robot interaction scenarios is still underexplored. In this article, we propose and evaluate a context-sensitive affect recognition framework for a robotic game companion for children. The robot can automatically detect affective states experienced by children in an interactive chess game scenario. The affect recognition framework is based on the automatic extraction of task features and social interaction-based features. Vision-based indicators of the children’s nonverbal behaviour are merged with contextual features related to the game and the interaction and given as input to support vector machines to create a context-sensitive multimodal system for affect recognition. The affect recognition framework is fully integrated in an architecture for adaptive human-robot interaction. Experimental evaluation showed that children’s affect can be successfully predicted using a combination of behavioural and contextual data related to the game and the interaction with the robot. It was found that contextual data alone can be used to successfully predict a subset of affective dimensions, such as interest toward the robot. Experiments also showed that engagement with the robot can be predicted using information about the user’s valence, interest and anticipatory behaviour. These results provide evidence that social engagement can be modelled as a state consisting of affect and attention components in the context of the interaction.

Theory of mind and emotion recognition skills in children with specific language impairment, autism spectrum disorder and typical development: group differences and connection to knowledge of grammatical morphology, word-finding abilities and verbal working memory.

Social perception skills, such as understanding the mind and emotions of others, affect children's communication abilities in real-life situations. In addition to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), there is increasing knowledge that children with specific language impairment (SLI) also demonstrate difficulties in their social perception abilities. To compare the performance of children with SLI, ASD and typical development (TD) in social perception tasks measuring Theory of Mind (ToM) and emotion recognition. In addition, to evaluate the association between social perception tasks and language tests measuring word-finding abilities, knowledge of grammatical morphology and verbal working memory. Children with SLI (n = 18), ASD (n = 14) and TD (n = 25) completed two NEPSY-II subtests measuring social perception abilities: (1) Affect Recognition and (2) ToM (includes Verbal and non-verbal Contextual tasks). In addition, children's word-finding abilities were measured with the TWF-2, grammatical morphology by using the Grammatical Closure subtest of ITPA, and verbal working memory by using subtests of Sentence Repetition or Word List Interference (chosen according the child's age) of the NEPSY-II. Children with ASD scored significantly lower than children with SLI or TD on the NEPSY-II Affect Recognition subtest. Both SLI and ASD groups scored significantly lower than TD children on Verbal tasks of the ToM subtest of NEPSY-II. However, there were no significant group differences on non-verbal Contextual tasks of the ToM subtest of the NEPSY-II. Verbal tasks of the ToM subtest were correlated with the Grammatical Closure subtest and TWF-2 in children with SLI. In children with ASD correlation between TWF-2 and ToM: Verbal tasks was moderate, almost achieving statistical significance, but no other correlations were found. Both SLI and ASD groups showed difficulties in tasks measuring verbal ToM but differences were not found in tasks measuring non-verbal Contextual ToM. The association between Verbal ToM tasks and language tests was stronger in children with SLI than in children with ASD. There is a need for further studies in order to understand interaction between different areas of language and cognitive development.

Mirror-touch synaesthesia and broader social perception abilities

In this talk, I will describe findings on a newly documented variant of synaesthesia in which the synaesthete experiences tactile sensations on their own body simply when observing touch to another person (mirror-touch synaesthesia). Functional brain imaging indicates that mirror-touch synaesthesia is linked to heightened neural activity in the same network of brain regions activated by us all when observing touch to others (shared-touch network). This network of brain regions has been suggested to play an important role in our social perception abilities by enabling us to map the experiences of others onto the same sensorimotor representations that are active when we experience the same state. Here, I will describe studies examining the relationship between mirror-touch synaesthesia and broader social perception abilities (e.g., empathy, emotion processing). I will discuss findings indicating that mirror-touch synaesthesia is linked to superior emotion perception and discuss the implications of this for models of social perception.

Social perception and message awareness as correlates of person‐centered regulative messages

This study reports the extent to which four social and message perception abilities predict the use of person‐centered messages in regulative influence situations: construct differentiation, number of prosocial influence goals, awareness of message effects, and positive outcome predictions. Undergraduate students completed several message tasks along with the Role Category Questionnaire to measure interpersonal cognitive complexity. Construct differentiation and the message analysis variables accounted for 45% of the variance in person‐centered regulative messages. Each of the message knowledge and goal variables was a significant predictor of person‐centered regulative messages. Person‐centered regulative messages were more likely to be produced by people with highly differentiated construct systems, people who had prosocial influence goals, and people who had knowledge of and confidence about the effects their messages would have on their message recipients.

Assessing Social Perception Abilities in Learning Disabled Students

According to clinical observations and experimental investigations of learning disabled students, these individuals experience more difficulty than their nondisabled peers in accurately recognizing and interpreting social cues. It has been suggested that such social perception deficits may be responsible for many of the problems which learning disabled children experience in their everyday social encounters with peers and teachers. For this reason, many special educators have advocated the development of specific remedial activities to ameliorate these deficits. Prior to any widespread implementation of remedial efforts, the data base upon which the deficits were identified must be carefully evaluated. The purpose of this article is to: (a) review experimental attempts at assessing the social perception skills of learning disabled children, (b) discuss methodological concerns relative to these experiments, and (c) suggest possible directions for future social perception research.