scholarly journals A Comparison of Children's Ability to Read Children's and Adults' Mental States in an Adaptation of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna van der Meulen ◽  
Simone Roerig ◽  
Doret de Ruyter ◽  
Pol van Lier ◽  
Lydia Krabbendam
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Eyes Task ◽  
The Mind

scholarly journals Mentalization within close relationships: The role of specific attachment style

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Błażej M. Bączkowski ◽  
Lidia Cierpiałkowska
Keyword(s):  
Attachment Style ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Attachment Styles ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Attachment Avoidance ◽  
Attachment Quality ◽  
Specific Attachment ◽  
Eyes Task ◽  
The Mind

AbstractMentalization is a form of social cognition that enables to perceive and interpret human behaviour in terms of intentional mental states (Frith & Frith, 2003) and is influenced by social context (e.g., O’Connor and Hirsch, 1999). Hence, we examined mentalization related to specific attachment relationships (Bowlby, 1969; Fraley, 2007). This study involved 115 participants (85% female) who reported their relationship-specific (ECR-RS; Fraley et al., 2011) and global attachment styles (ECR; Brennan, Clark, Shaver, 1998), and perspective-taking tendency towards their attachment figures (IRI-PT subscale; Davis, 1983). Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task-Revised (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) was used as a proxy for mentalization disregarding relationships. The results showed that perspective-taking was associated with relationship-specific attachment avoidance (rs > -.29; all ps < .01) whereas global characteristics of mentalization were not related to attachment quality. Our findings indicate that the link between attachment quality and mentalization is relationship-specific.

scholarly journals Familiarity with children improves the ability to recognize children’s mental states: an fMRI study using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task and the Nencki Children Eyes Test

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Szczypiński ◽  
Anna Alińska ◽  
Marek Waligóra ◽  
Maciej Kopera ◽  
Aleksandra Krasowska ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Eyes Task ◽  
The Mind

scholarly journals Activity in the brain’s valuation and mentalizing networks is associated with propagation of online recommendations

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa C. Baek ◽  
Matthew Brook O’Donnell ◽  
Christin Scholz ◽  
Rui Pei ◽  
Javier O. Garcia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Prior Work ◽  
Opinion Change ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mentalizing System

AbstractWord of mouth recommendations influence a wide range of choices and behaviors. What takes place in the mind of recommendation receivers that determines whether they will be successfully influenced? Prior work suggests that brain systems implicated in assessing the value of stimuli (i.e., subjective valuation) and understanding others’ mental states (i.e., mentalizing) play key roles. The current study used neuroimaging and natural language classifiers to extend these findings in a naturalistic context and tested the extent to which the two systems work together or independently in responding to social influence. First, we show that in response to text-based social media recommendations, activity in both the brain’s valuation system and mentalizing system was associated with greater likelihood of opinion change. Second, participants were more likely to update their opinions in response to negative, compared to positive, recommendations, with activity in the mentalizing system scaling with the negativity of the recommendations. Third, decreased functional connectivity between valuation and mentalizing systems was associated with opinion change. Results highlight the role of brain regions involved in mentalizing and positive valuation in recommendation propagation, and further show that mentalizing may be particularly key in processing negative recommendations, whereas the valuation system is relevant in evaluating both positive and negative recommendations.

Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Baron-Cohen ◽  
Therese Jolliffe ◽  
Catherine Mortimore ◽  
Mary Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Eyes Task ◽  
The Mind

Luminosity and the KK Thesis

2019 ◽  
pp. 31-48
Author(s):  
Robert C. Stalnaker
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
The State ◽  
Simplified Model ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Margin Of Error ◽  
The Mind

A mental state is luminous if and only if being in a state of that kind always puts one in a position to know that one is in the state. This chapter is a critique of Timothy Williamson’s margin-of-error argument that no nontrivial states are luminous in this sense. While I agree with Williamson’s rejection of a Cartesian internalist conception of the mind, I argue that an externalist conception (one based on information theory) can be reconciled with the luminosity of intentional mental states such as knowledge. My argument, which uses an artificial and simplified model of knowledge, is not a direct rebuttal to his argument, as applied to a more realistic notion of the knowledge of human beings, but I argue that it shows that a luminosity assumption is compatible with externalism about knowledge, and it suggest an intuitively plausible strategy for resisting his argument.

Materialism in the philosophy of mind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Main Difficulty ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Causal Dependence ◽  
Physical Relation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Mind

Materialism – which, for almost all purposes, is the same as physicalism – is the theory that everything that exists is material. Natural science shows that most things are intelligible in material terms, but mind presents problems in at least two ways. The first is consciousness, as found in the ‘raw feel’ of subjective experience. The second is the intentionality of thought, which is the property of being about something beyond itself; ‘aboutness’ seems not to be a physical relation in the ordinary sense. There have been three ways of approaching these problems. The hardest is eliminativism, according to which there are no ‘raw feels’, no intentionality and, in general, no mental states: the mind and all its furniture are part of an outdated science that we now see to be false. Next is reductionism, which seeks to give an account of our experience and of intentionality in terms which are acceptable to a physical science: this means, in practice, analysing the mind in terms of its role in producing behaviour. Finally, the materialist may accept the reality and irreducibility of mind, but claim that it depends on matter in such an intimate way – more intimate than mere causal dependence – that materialism is not threatened by the irreducibility of mind. The first two approaches can be called ‘hard materialism’, the third ‘soft materialism’. The problem for eliminativism is that we find it difficult to credit that any belief that we think and feel is a theoretical speculation. Reductionism’s main difficulty is that there seems to be more to consciousness than its contribution to behaviour: a robotic machine could behave as we do without thinking or feeling. The soft materialist has to explain supervenience in a way that makes the mind not epiphenomenal without falling into the problems of interactionism.

Mind, identity theory of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Identity Theory ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Ontological Categories ◽  
Great Merit ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

We know that the brain is intimately connected with mental activity. Indeed, doctors now define death in terms of the cessation of the relevant brain activity. The identity theory of mind holds that the intimate connection is identity: the mind is the brain, or, more precisely, mental states are states of the brain. The theory goes directly against a long tradition according to which mental and material belong to quite distinct ontological categories – the mental being essentially conscious, the material essentially unconscious. This tradition has been bedevilled by the problem of how essentially immaterial states could be caused by the material world, as would happen when we see a tree, and how they could cause material states, as would happen when we decide to make an omelette. A great merit of the identity theory is that it avoids this problem: interaction between mental and material becomes simply interaction between one subset of material states, namely certain states of a sophisticated central nervous system, and other material states. The theory also brings the mind within the scope of modern science. More and more phenomena are turning out to be explicable in the physical terms of modern science: phenomena once explained in terms of spells, possession by devils, Thor’s thunderbolts, and so on, are now explained in more mundane, physical terms. If the identity theory is right, the same goes for the mind. Neuroscience will in time reveal the secrets of the mind in the same general way that the theory of electricity reveals the secrets of lightning. This possibility has received enormous support from advances in computing. We now have at least the glimmerings of an idea of how a purely material or physical system could do some of the things minds can do. Nevertheless, there are many questions to be asked of the identity theory. How could states that seem so different turn out to be one and the same? Would neurophysiologists actually see my thoughts and feelings if they looked at my brain? When we report on our mental states what are we reporting on – our brains?

Complexity is a cue to the mind

2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-586
Author(s):  
George Kampis
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Dynamical Behavior ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Target Article ◽  
The Mind

The relevance of chaotic itinerancy and other types of exotic dynamical behavior described by Tsuda (2001) certainly goes beyond the scope of his target article. These concepts of dynamics may offer a general framework for the understanding of complexity, which could help to restructure the analysis and conceptualization of mental states in novel ways, providing insights for the philosophy of mind.

Fact or fiction?

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Chlebuch ◽  
Thalia R. Goldstein ◽  
Deena Skolnick Weisberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Eyes Task ◽  
The Mind

Abstract Many studies have claimed to find that reading fiction leads to improvements in social cognition. But this work has left open the critical question of whether any type of narrative, fictional or nonfictional, might have similar effects. To address this question, as well as to test whether framing a narrative as fiction matters, the current studies presented participants (N = 268 in Study 1; N = 362 in Study 2) with literary fiction texts, narrative nonfiction texts, expository nonfiction texts, or no texts. We tested their theory-of-mind abilities using the picture-based Reading the Mind in the Eyes task and a text-based test of higher-order social cognition. Reading anything was associated with higher scores compared to reading nothing, but the effects of framing and text type were inconsistent. These results suggest that prior claims regarding positive effects of reading fiction on mentalizing should be seen as tenuous; other mechanisms may be driving previously published effects.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document