scholarly journals Measuring disorganized speech in schizophrenia: automated analysis explains variance in cognitive deficits beyond clinician-rated scales

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 440-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. S. Minor ◽  
J. A. Willits ◽  
M. P. Marggraf ◽  
M. N. Jones ◽  
P. H. Lysaker

AbstractBackgroundConveying information cohesively is an essential element of communication that is disrupted in schizophrenia. These disruptions are typically expressed through disorganized symptoms, which have been linked to neurocognitive, social cognitive, and metacognitive deficits. Automated analysis can objectively assess disorganization within sentences, between sentences, and across paragraphs by comparing explicit communication to a large text corpus.MethodLittle work in schizophrenia has tested: (1) links between disorganized symptoms measured via automated analysis and neurocognition, social cognition, or metacognition; and (2) if automated analysis explains incremental variance in cognitive processes beyond clinician-rated scales. Disorganization was measured in schizophrenia (n = 81) with Coh-Metrix 3.0, an automated program that calculates basic and complex language indices. Trained staff also assessed neurocognition, social cognition, metacognition, and clinician-rated disorganization.ResultsFindings showed that all three cognitive processes were significantly associated with at least one automated index of disorganization. When automated analysis was compared with a clinician-rated scale, it accounted for significant variance in neurocognition and metacognition beyond the clinician-rated measure. When combined, these two methods explained 28–31% of the variance in neurocognition, social cognition, and metacognition.ConclusionsThis study illustrated how automated analysis can highlight the specific role of disorganization in neurocognition, social cognition, and metacognition. Generally, those with poor cognition also displayed more disorganization in their speech—making it difficult for listeners to process essential information needed to tie the speaker's ideas together. Our findings showcase how implementing a mixed-methods approach in schizophrenia can explain substantial variance in cognitive processes.

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 1410-1429
Author(s):  
Claire Wilson ◽  
Tommy van Steen ◽  
Christabel Akinyode ◽  
Zara P. Brodie ◽  
Graham G. Scott

Technology has given rise to online behaviors such as sexting. It is important that we examine predictors of such behavior in order to understand who is more likely to sext and thus inform intervention aimed at sexting awareness. We used the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to examine sexting beliefs and behavior. Participants (n = 418; 70.3% women) completed questionnaires assessing attitudes (instrumental and affective), subjective norms (injunctive and descriptive), control perceptions (self-efficacy and controllability) and intentions toward sexting. Specific sexting beliefs (fun/carefree beliefs, perceived risks and relational expectations) were also measured and sexting behavior reported. Relationship status, instrumental attitude, injunctive norm, descriptive norm and self-efficacy were associated with sexting intentions. Relationship status, intentions and self-efficacy related to sexting behavior. Results provide insight into the social-cognitive factors related to individuals’ sexting behavior and bring us closer to understanding what beliefs predict the behavior.


1993 ◽  
Vol 77 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1251-1258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hideki Ohira ◽  
Kiyomi Kurono

Two experiments were conducted to examine effects of facial expressions upon social cognitive processes in which the impression of another person is formed. In each experiment, 30 female college students were induced to display or conceal their facial reactions to a hypothetical target person whose behaviors were mildly hostile (Exp. 1) or mildly friendly (Exp. 2), or their facial expressions were not manipulated. Displaying the facial expressions shifted the impression into the congruent directions with hedonic values corresponding to the facial expressions. Concealing the facial expressions, however, did not influence impression formation. Also, the positive-negative asymmetry was observed in the facial feedback effects, that is, the negative facial expression had a stronger effect on social cognition than the positive one.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Guazzelli Williamson

During adolescence, our bodies, brains, and behaviors undergo marked developmental changes. Adolescents often become increasingly aware of their social worlds and use this stage of development to develop skills to help them navigate this changing landscape. Up until recently, an overwhelming majority of research on social cognition–specifically on understanding the mental states of others–has focused on childhood. In this chapter, I demonstrate that adolescence is an important developmental period for the refinement and sophistication of social cognitive processes that began developing during childhood. I also discuss the development of more advanced and distinct social cognitive processes. Additionally, I review the available literature on the developmental trajectories of advanced social cognition across adolescence–including individual differences, cultural considerations, and implications for adolescent health and wellbeing. Finally, I describe how future research may begin to address current knowledge gaps on this topic.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
pierre-aurélien beuriat ◽  
Shira Cohen-Zimerman ◽  
Gretchen Smith ◽  
Frank Krueger ◽  
Barry Gordon ◽  
...  

Abstract Introduction: Theory of Mind (ToM) is a social-cognitive skill that allows the understanding of the intentions, beliefs, and desires of others. There is a distinction between affective and cognitive ToM, with evidence showing that these processes rely on partially distinct neural networks. The role of the cerebellum in social cognition has only been rarely explored. In this study, we tested whether the cerebellum is necessary for cognitive and affective ToM performance. Material and methods: We investigated adults with traumatic brain injury (n=193) and healthy controls (n=52) using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) and by measuring the impact on functional connectivity. Results: First, we observed that damage to the cerebellum affected Cognitive but not Affective ToM processing. Further, we found a lateralization effect for the role of the cerebellum in cognitive ToM with participants with left cerebellar injury performing worse than those with right cerebellar injury. Both VLSM and standard statistical analysis provided evidence that left cerebellar Crus I and lobule VI contributed to ToM processing. Lastly, we found that disconnection of the left thalamic projection and the left fronto-striatal fasciculus was associated with poor cognitive ToM performance. Conclusions: Our study is the first to reveal direct causal neuropsychological evidence for a role of the cerebellum in cognitive, but not in affective, ToM, processing. It reinforces the idea that social cognition relies on a complex network functionally connected through white matter pathways that include the cerebellum. It supports evidence that the neural networks underpinning cognitive and affective ToM can be differentiated.


2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (03) ◽  
pp. 525-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz ◽  
James Hedrick

During the past two decades, mounting evidence suggests that much of human social cognition occurs without deliberate effort and largely outside conscious awareness. Dual-process models, which distinguish explicit (conscious, slow, effortful) cognitive processes from implicit (often unconscious, fast, effortless) cognitive processes, “form the dominant paradigm [of social cognition research] for the past 20 years or more” (Evans 2008). Although these advances in social cognition research have begun to be integrated into models of political cognition over the past decade (e.g., Kim, Taber, and Lodge 2010; Lodge and Taber 2013; see Nosek, Graham, and Hawkins 2010 for a review), and are beginning to influence other disciplines like communication (see Hefner et al. 2011), the role of implicit processes in outcomes commonly studied by political scientists deserves more attention. This symposium aims to showcase the diverse set of subject areas within political science to which dual-process models have been and can be applied. We hope that this symposium is a springboard for those who are considering bringing a dual-process approach into their own research by providing an overview of relevant literatures and methods.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vaughan Bell ◽  
Nichola Raihani ◽  
Sam Wilkinson

Due to the traditional conceptualisation of delusion as ‘irrational belief’, cognitive models of delusions largely focus on impairments to domain-general reasoning. Nevertheless, current rationality-impairment models do not account for the fact that i) equivalently irrational beliefs can be induced through adaptive social cognitive processes, reflecting social integration rather than impairment; ii) delusions are overwhelmingly socially-themed; iii) delusions show a reduced sensitivity to social context, both in terms of how they are shaped and how they are communicated. Consequently, we argue that models of delusions need to include alteration to coalitional cognition – processes involved in affiliation, group perception, and the strategic management of relationships. This approach has the advantage of better accounting for both content (social themes) and form (fixity) of delusion. It is also supported by the established role of mesolimbic dopamine in both delusions and social organisation, and the ongoing reconceptualisation of belief as serving a social organisational function.


2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (9) ◽  
pp. 1406-1417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Contreras ◽  
Jessica Schirmer ◽  
Mahzarin R. Banaji ◽  
Jason P. Mitchell

An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., “scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature”). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition—medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the “mind” of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities.


Author(s):  
James S. Uleman ◽  
S. Adil Saribay

“Initial impressions” join personality and social psychology like no other field of study—“personality” because impressions are about personalities and perceivers’ personalities affect these impressions; and “social” because social cognitive processes influence impression formation and sociocultural contexts have major effects on impressions. How people describe others is reviewed: terms used, how descriptions reveal theories about others, and importance of types and categories. Research on social cognitive processes underlying these descriptions is highlighted: automatic and controlled attention, effects of primes and their dependence on contexts, acquisition of valence, spontaneous inferences, and interplay of automatic and control processes. Accuracy of initial impressions is examined, as are what accuracy means and motivated biases and distortions. Perceiver features and relations between targets and perceivers are reviewed. Frameworks for understanding explanations, as distinct from descriptions, are detailed: attribution theory, theory of mind, and simulation theory, including synchrony and the role of embodied cognition and metaphor.


SAGE Open ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824401880987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia Di Dio ◽  
Sara Isernia ◽  
Chiara Ceolaro ◽  
Antonella Marchetti ◽  
Davide Massaro

The study of social cognition involves the attribution of states of mind to humans, as well as, quite recently, to nonhuman creatures, like God. Some studies support the role of social cognition in religious beliefs, whereas others ascribe religious beliefs to an ontological knowledge bias. The present study compares these distinct approaches in 37 catholic children aged 4 to 10 years, who were administered an adapted version of the unexpected content task assessing false beliefs of different agents: a human, a dog, a robot, and God. The children were also administered an intentionality understanding task, a component of mentalization abilities, and an interview on ontological knowledge assessing emotions, intentions, imagination, and epistemic knowledge. In line with previous research, the results showed that children did not attribute false beliefs to God as they did to the human and to other nonhuman agents. Importantly, while false-belief attribution to the human was associated with the children’s ability to attribute mental states (intentionality understanding), false-belief attribution to God was related to children’s ontological knowledge. We conclude that, contrary to false-belief attribution to the human and to other nonhuman agents, children’s understanding of God’s mind is largely a function of ontological knowledge about God, rather than of children’s social cognitive functions.


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