-
Journal of Affective Disorders Aug 2022Social anxiety is highly prevalent and has increased in young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since social anxiety negatively impacts interpersonal functioning,... (Review)
Review
BACKGROUND
Social anxiety is highly prevalent and has increased in young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since social anxiety negatively impacts interpersonal functioning, identifying aspects of social cognition that may be impaired can increase our understanding of the development and maintenance of social anxiety disorder. However, to date, studies examining associations between social anxiety and social cognition have resulted in mixed findings.
METHODS
The aim of this systematic review was to summarize the literature on the association between social anxiety and social cognition, while also considering several potential moderators and covariates that may influence findings.
RESULTS
A systematic search identified 52 studies. Results showed mixed evidence for the association between social anxiety and lower-level social cognitive processes (emotion recognition and affect sharing) and a trend for a negative association with higher-level social cognitive processes (theory of mind and empathic accuracy). Most studies examining valence-specific effects found a significant negative association for positive and neutral stimuli.
LIMITATIONS
Not all aspects of social cognition were included (e.g., attributional bias) and we focused on adults and not children, limiting the scope of the review.
CONCLUSIONS
Future studies would benefit from the inclusion of relevant moderators and covariates, multiple well-validated measures within the same domain of social cognition, and assessments of interpersonal functioning outside of the laboratory. Additional research examining the moderating role of attention or interpretation biases on social cognitive performance, and the potential benefit of social cognitive skills training for social anxiety, could inform and improve existing cognitive behavioral interventions.
Topics: Anxiety; COVID-19; Cognition; Humans; Pandemics; Social Cognition; Social Perception; Young Adult
PubMed: 35490878
DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2022.04.130 -
Acta Psychologica Feb 2022
Topics: Humans; Social Perception; Speech Perception; Visual Perception
PubMed: 34973684
DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103481 -
Psychopathology 2022
Topics: Humans; Mental Disorders; Social Perception
PubMed: 35580564
DOI: 10.1159/000524754 -
Trends in Cognitive Sciences Dec 2023Seeing the interactions between other people is a critical part of our everyday visual experience, but recognizing the social interactions of others is often considered... (Review)
Review
Seeing the interactions between other people is a critical part of our everyday visual experience, but recognizing the social interactions of others is often considered outside the scope of vision and grouped with higher-level social cognition like theory of mind. Recent work, however, has revealed that recognition of social interactions is efficient and automatic, is well modeled by bottom-up computational algorithms, and occurs in visually-selective regions of the brain. We review recent evidence from these three methodologies (behavioral, computational, and neural) that converge to suggest the core of social interaction perception is visual. We propose a computational framework for how this process is carried out in the brain and offer directions for future interdisciplinary investigations of social perception.
Topics: Humans; Social Interaction; Social Perception; Brain; Cognition
PubMed: 37805385
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2023.09.001 -
Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Mar 2017Claims about alterations in perception based on manipulations of the energetics hypothesis (and other influences) are often framed as interesting specifically because...
Claims about alterations in perception based on manipulations of the energetics hypothesis (and other influences) are often framed as interesting specifically because they affect our perceptual experience. Many control experiments conducted on such perceptual effects suggest, however, that they are the result of attribution effects and other kinds of judgmental biases influencing the reporting process rather than perception itself. Schnall (2017, this issue), appealing to Heider's work on attribution, argues that it is fruitless to try to distinguish between perception and attribution. This makes the energetics hypothesis less interesting.
Topics: Control Groups; Humans; Judgment; Reading Frames; Social Perception
PubMed: 28346119
DOI: 10.1177/1745691616677829 -
Annual Review of Psychology Jan 2024Social psychologists attempt to explain how we interact by appealing to basic principles of how we think. To make good on this ambition, they are increasingly relying on... (Review)
Review
Social psychologists attempt to explain how we interact by appealing to basic principles of how we think. To make good on this ambition, they are increasingly relying on an interconnected set of formal tools that model inference, attribution, value-guided decision making, and multi-agent interactions. By reviewing progress in each of these areas and highlighting the connections between them, we can better appreciate the structure of social thought and behavior, while also coming to understand when, why, and how formal tools can be useful for social psychologists.
Topics: Humans; Psychology, Social; Social Perception
PubMed: 37540891
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-021323-040420 -
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal... Feb 2022Dominance captures behavioural patterns found in social hierarchies that arise from agonistic interactions in which some individuals coercively exploit their control... (Review)
Review
Dominance captures behavioural patterns found in social hierarchies that arise from agonistic interactions in which some individuals coercively exploit their control over costs and benefits to extract deference from others, often through aggression, threats and/or intimidation. Accumulating evidence points to its importance in humans and its separation from prestige-an alternate avenue to high status in which status arises from information (e.g. knowledge, skill, etc.) or other non-rival goods. In this review, we provide an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of dominance as a concept within evolutionary biology, discuss the challenges of applying it to humans and consider alternative theoretical accounts which assert that dominance is relevant to understanding status in humans. We then review empirical evidence for its continued importance in human groups, including the effects of dominance-independently of prestige-on measurable outcomes such as social influence and reproductive fitness, evidence for specialized dominance psychology, and evidence for gender-specific effects. Finally, because human-specific factors such as norms and coalitions may place bounds on purely coercive status-attainment strategies, we end by considering key situations and contexts that increase the likelihood for dominance status to coexist alongside prestige status within the same individual, including how: (i) institutional power and authority tend to elicit dominance; (ii) dominance-enhancing traits can at times generate benefits for others (prestige); and (iii) certain dominance cues and ethology may lead to mis-attributions of prestige. This article is part of the theme issue 'The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies'.
Topics: Aggression; Biological Evolution; Group Processes; Humans; Social Dominance; Social Perception
PubMed: 35000450
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0451 -
Tijdschrift Voor Psychiatrie 2021
Topics: Humans; Recognition, Psychology; Social Cognition; Social Perception
PubMed: 33913136
DOI: No ID Found -
Experimental Psychology Sep 2019According to (a) the beauty ideal of a full head of hair and (b) the physical attractiveness stereotype (PAS; "what is beautiful is good"), bald men should appear less...
According to (a) the beauty ideal of a full head of hair and (b) the physical attractiveness stereotype (PAS; "what is beautiful is good"), bald men should appear less attractive than nonbald men, not only physically but also socially. To explain inconsistent results on this prediction in previous research, we suggest two antagonistic processes: the automatic activation of the PAS at the implicit level and its suppression at the explicit level, the latter process selectively triggered by individuating information about the target person. In line with this account, we only found negative social attractiveness ratings for bald men by same-aged women when individuating target information was lacking (Experiment 1). In contrast, irrespective of whether individuating information was available or not, we reliably found evidence for the PAS in different implicit paradigms (the implicit association test in Experiment 2 and a source monitoring task in Experiment 3). We conclude that individuating information about bald men suppresses PAS application, but not PAS activation.
Topics: Adult; Alopecia; Beauty; Female; Humans; Social Perception; Stereotyping; Young Adult
PubMed: 31603047
DOI: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000457 -
Trends in Cognitive Sciences Jul 2017Forming conceptually-rich social categories helps people to navigate the complex social world by allowing them to reason about the likely thoughts, beliefs, actions, and... (Review)
Review
Forming conceptually-rich social categories helps people to navigate the complex social world by allowing them to reason about the likely thoughts, beliefs, actions, and interactions of others, as guided by group membership. Nevertheless, social categorization often has nefarious consequences. We suggest that the foundation of the human ability to form useful social categories is in place in infancy: social categories guide the inferences infants make about the shared characteristics and social relationships of other people. We also suggest that the ability to form abstract social categories may be separable from the eventual negative downstream consequences of social categorization, including prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping. Although a tendency to form inductively-rich social categories appears early in ontogeny, prejudice based on each particular category dimension may not be inevitable.
Topics: Biological Ontologies; Humans; Prejudice; Social Identification; Social Perception; Stereotyping
PubMed: 28499741
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2017.04.004