scholarly journals Impact of interracial contact on inferring mental states from facial expressions

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 202137
Author(s):  
Grace Handley ◽  
Jennifer T. Kubota ◽  
Tianyi Li ◽  
Jasmin Cloutier
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Person Perception ◽  
Intergroup Contact ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Facial Cues ◽  
Interracial Contact ◽  
Face Memory ◽  
Black And White

Although decades of research have shown that intergroup contact critically impacts person perception and evaluation, little is known about how contact shapes the ability to infer others' mental states from facial cues (commonly referred to as mentalizing). In a pair of studies, we demonstrated that interracial contact and motivation to attend to faces jointly influence White perceivers’ ability to infer mental states based on facial expressions displaying secondary emotions from both White targets alone (study 1) and White and Black targets (study 2; pre-registered). Consistent with previous work on the effect of motivation and interracial contact on other-race face memory, we found that motivation and interracial contact interacted to shape perceivers' accuracy at inferring mental states from secondary emotions. When motivated to attend to the task, high-contact White perceivers were more accurate at inferring both Black and White targets’ mental states; unexpectedly, the opposite was true for low-contact perceivers. Importantly, the target race did not interact with interracial contact, suggesting that contact is associated with general changes in mentalizing irrespective of target race. These findings expand the theoretical understanding and implications of contact for fundamental social cognition.

scholarly journals Abnormal visual representations associated with confusion of perceived facial expression in schizophrenia with social anxiety disorder

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand ◽  
Tania Lecomte ◽  
M. Archibaldo Bravo ◽  
Martin Lepage ◽  
Stéphane Potvin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Anxiety Disorder ◽  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Facial Expression ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Social Anxiety Disorder ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Facial Cues ◽  
Spatial Frequencies ◽  
Coarse Information

Abstract Deficits in social functioning are especially severe amongst schizophrenia individuals with the prevalent comorbidity of social anxiety disorder (SZ&SAD). Yet, the mechanisms underlying the recognition of facial expression of emotions—a hallmark of social cognition—are practically unexplored in SZ&SAD. Here, we aim to reveal the visual representations SZ&SAD (n = 16) and controls (n = 14) rely on for facial expression recognition. We ran a total of 30,000 trials of a facial expression categorization task with Bubbles, a data-driven technique. Results showed that SZ&SAD’s ability to categorize facial expression was impared compared to controls. More severe negative symptoms (flat affect, apathy, reduced social drive) was associated with more impaired emotion recognition ability, and with more biases in attributing neutral affect to faces. Higher social anxiety symptoms, on the other hand, was found to enhance the reaction speed to neutral and angry faces. Most importantly, Bubbles showed that these abnormalities could be explained by inefficient visual representations of emotions: compared to controls, SZ&SAD subjects relied less on fine facial cues (high spatial frequencies) and more on coarse facial cues (low spatial frequencies). SZ&SAD participants also never relied on the eye regions (only on the mouth) to categorize facial expressions. We discuss how possible interactions between early (low sensitivity to coarse information) and late stages of the visual system (overreliance on these coarse features) might disrupt SZ&SAD’s recognition of facial expressions. Our findings offer perceptual mechanisms through which comorbid SZ&SAD impairs crucial aspects of social cognition, as well as functional psychopathology.

scholarly journals Rethinking Autism, Theism, and Atheism

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingela Visuri
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Body Language ◽  
High Functioning ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Multisensory Input

This anthropologically informed study explores descriptions of communication with invisible, superhuman agents in high functioning young adults on the autism spectrum. Based on material from interviews, two hypotheses are formulated. First, autistic individuals may experience communication with bodiless agents (e.g., gods, angels, and spirits) as less complex than interaction with peers, since it is unrestricted by multisensory input, such as body language, facial expressions, and intonation. Second, descriptions of how participants absorb into “imaginary realities” suggest that such mental states are desirable due to qualities that facilitate social cognition: While the empirical world comes through as fragmented and incoherent, imaginary worlds offer predictability, emotional coherence, and benevolent minds. These results do not conform to popular expectations that autistic minds are less adapted to experience supernatural agents, and it is instead argued that imaginative, autistic individuals may embrace religious and fictive agents in search for socially and emotionally comprehensible interaction.

scholarly journals Episodic Mindreading: Mentalizing Guided by Imagined and Remembered Scenes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Gaesser
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Memory System ◽  
Body Language ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Mind Reading ◽  
Open Questions

Attributing mental states to other people fundamentally shapes how we bond, coordinate, and predict the actions of others. Perceiving a person’s facial expressions and body language contribute to our ability to understand what they are thinking and feeling. Yet, people do not exist in a vacuum and individuals often think about people who are not directly in front of them. People inhabit remembered and imagined episodes, where the surrounding location and objects can guide attributions of their mental states. In this article, I propose the episodic mind reading hypothesis, arguing that the episodic representation in which a target person is embedded will affect whether and how the target’s mind is read. The content and phenomenological quality of imagined and remembered episodes can alter what mental states are attributed to a target and the accessibility of those mental states. This hypothesis encourages researchers to think about mentalizing as neither dependent on nor completely exclusive from the episodic memory system. Instead, the episodic memory system can modulate and inform mind reading, and likely vice versa. The article reviews extant knowledge and highlights open questions for future research to explore with implications for healthy and impaired social cognition.

Do facial cues of body weight influence perceptions of happy and sad facial expressions? Evidence from an Arab sample

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Aied Alharbi ◽  
Benedict C Jones
Keyword(s):  
Body Weight ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Person Perception ◽  
Emotion Perception ◽  
Facial Cues ◽  
Face Shape ◽  
Facial Expressions Of Emotion ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Influence Perceptions

Facial expressions of emotion play an important role in social interactions. Recent work has suggested that experimentally increasing body-weight cues makes faces displaying happy expressions look happier and makes faces displaying sad expressions look sadder. These results were interpreted as evidence that a ‘heavy people are happier’ stereotype influences emotion perception. Because this original study was carried out at a university in the USA, and emotion perceptions can differ across cultures, we undertook a conceptual replication of this study in an Arab sample. We found that experimentally increasing body-weight cues made faces displaying happy expressions look significantly happier, but did not make faces displaying sad expressions look significantly sadder. These results present partial support for the proposal that a ‘heavy people are happier’ stereotype influences emotion perception and that people integrate information from face shape and facial expressions in person perception.

Interracial contact at work: Does workplace diversity reduce bias?

2020 ◽  
pp. 136843022093263
Author(s):  
Sean Darling-Hammond ◽  
Randy T. Lee ◽  
Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton
Keyword(s):  
Intergroup Contact ◽  
Workplace Diversity ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Interracial Contact ◽  
Working Adults ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Hispanic Adults ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
The Relationship

Research suggests that anti-Black bias among White Americans is persistent, pervasive, and has powerful negative effects on the lives of both Black and White Americans. Research also suggests that intergroup contact in workplaces can reduce bias. We seek to address two limitations in prior research. First, the workplaces reviewed in prior studies may not be typical. Second, previously observed relationships between workplace contact and bias may stem from selection bias—namely, that White individuals who tend to work with Black individuals are systematically different from those who do not, and those systematic differences explain lower bias levels. To address these issues, we review records ( N = 3,359) of White, non-Hispanic, working adults in a nationally representative survey to examine the relationship between workplace contact and racial closeness bias after adjusting for an exhaustive set of potential confounders. Using propensity score matching, we compare individuals who work with Black individuals with their “virtual twins”—individuals who have the same propensity of working with Black individuals but do not. We estimate that having a Black coworker causes a statistically significant reduction in racial closeness bias for White, non-Hispanic adults.

scholarly journals Joint Action without Mutual Beliefs

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Figà Talamanca
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Joint Action ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Cooperative Hunting ◽  
Mutual Awareness ◽  
Shared Practice ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Joint action among human beings is characterized by using elaborate cognitive feats, such as representing the mental states of others about a certain state of affairs. It is still debated how these capacities evolved in the hominid lineage. I suggest that the consolidation of a shared practice over time can foster the predictability of other’s behavior. This might facilitate the evolutionary passage from inferring what others might know by simply seeing them and what they are viewing towards a mutual awareness of each other’s beliefs. I will examine the case for cooperative hunting in one chimpanzee community and argue that it is evidence that they have the potential to achieve common ground, suggesting that the consolidation of a practice might have supported the evolution of higher social cognition in the hominid lineage.

scholarly journals From Gaze Perception to Social Cognition: The Shared-Attention System

2021 ◽  
pp. 174569162095377
Author(s):  
Lisa J. Stephenson ◽  
S. Gareth Edwards ◽  
Andrew P. Bayliss
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Evaluation Agency ◽  
Gaze Following ◽  
Gaze Perception ◽  
Shared Attention ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Attention System ◽  
Sas Model

When two people look at the same object in the environment and are aware of each other’s attentional state, they find themselves in a shared-attention episode. This can occur through intentional or incidental signaling and, in either case, causes an exchange of information between the two parties about the environment and each other’s mental states. In this article, we give an overview of what is known about the building blocks of shared attention (gaze perception and joint attention) and focus on bringing to bear new findings on the initiation of shared attention that complement knowledge about gaze following and incorporate new insights from research into the sense of agency. We also present a neurocognitive model, incorporating first-, second-, and third-order social cognitive processes (the shared-attention system, or SAS), building on previous models and approaches. The SAS model aims to encompass perceptual, cognitive, and affective processes that contribute to and follow on from the establishment of shared attention. These processes include fundamental components of social cognition such as reward, affective evaluation, agency, empathy, and theory of mind.

The Impact of Childhood Experience on Amygdala Response to Perceptually Familiar Black and White Faces

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (9) ◽  
pp. 1992-2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasmin Cloutier ◽  
Tianyi Li ◽  
Joshua Correll
Keyword(s):  
Neural Substrates ◽  
Relative Reduction ◽  
Childhood Experience ◽  
Childhood Exposure ◽  
Interracial Contact ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Race Perception ◽  
Amygdala Response ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Black Faces

Given the well-documented involvement of the amygdala in race perception, the current study aimed to investigate how interracial contact during childhood shapes amygdala response to racial outgroup members in adulthood. Of particular interest was the impact of childhood experience on amygdala response to familiar, compared with novel, Black faces. Controlling for a number of well-established individual difference measures related to interracial attitudes, the results reveal that perceivers with greater childhood exposure to racial outgroup members display greater relative reduction in amygdala response to familiar Black faces. The implications of such findings are discussed in the context of previous investigations into the neural substrates of race perception and in consideration of potential mechanisms by which childhood experience may shape race perception.

Male Youth Activities and Metropolitan Context

1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
S R Holloway
Keyword(s):  
Black Male ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
White Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Activity Choices ◽  
The Impact

The research reported here examines the impact of metropolitan location on the activity choices of a sample of black and white male youths living in large metropolitan areas in the United States in 1980. The results of the analysis confirm that similar youths living in different metropolitan areas will make different activity choices. Furthermore, black male youths are found to be substantially more sensitive to metropolitan context than white male youths. The analysis also suggests that black and white disadvantaged youths respond differently to metropolitan context in terms of the trade-offs between activities. Disadvantaged black male youths are highly unlikely to be employed in all metropolitan areas and tend to trade-off staying in school with idleness, whereas disadvantaged white male youths tend to trade-off employment with idleness, depending on the metropolitan area they live in. This research confirms the importance of incorporating geographic context into our theoretical understanding of male youths' behavior. We must also, however, continue to address the implications of race as it shapes the context-dependent labor-market experiences of male youths.

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