Social Cognition (AQA A Level Psychology): Flashcards

Self-reflective role-taking. The child can take on another person's perspective and compare it to their own.

True.

In stage 3 (10–12 years), the child understands that others have different views based on different beliefs, and that others can understand the child's view even if their beliefs differ.

Selman's stage 4, social and conventional system role-taking, begins at 12+ years.

That differing viewpoints can be a source of conflict and that systems such as law and order need to be in place to deal with it.

Over five years of interviews about friendship and peer-group dilemmas, children developed perspective-taking in line with and predicted by Selman's levels.

Children aged 4–12, tested alongside adults, showed more egocentric bias the younger they were.

Children aged 8–12 with ADHD did worse than controls on Selman's perspective-taking tasks, showing the theory helps explain atypical development.

It could inform educational plans for children with special needs, e.g. interventions that explicitly teach perspective-taking to children with ADHD rather than assuming it develops with age.

Social development also involves internal factors such as empathy and emotional self-regulation and external factors such as family climate, so the theory explains only one aspect of a complex process.

Variables such as perspective-taking, social competence and empathy are difficult to operationalise and measure.

True.

It suggests all children move through the same fixed stages in a set sequence, which may underestimate individual differences and social and emotional factors.

Theory of mind is the ability to understand that other people have separate mental states, such as thoughts, feelings, ideas, attitudes or knowledge, from one's own.

Understanding intentionality, e.g. predicting James will walk his dog because he is wearing his dog-walking coat. Dennett (1987) saw this as a precursor to ToM.

ToM undergoes a significant shift at around age four, when most children begin to pass false belief tasks.

The theory of mind module is an innate mechanism, proposed by Leslie (1987), that matures in the brain at around 4 years of age and gives ToM a biological basis.

Whether children understand that others can believe something that is not true. To pass, the child must predict the actions, thoughts or beliefs of another person.

Pencils. The child is then asked what a friend who has not seen inside will think the box contains.

False.

Saying "pencils" fails, as the child assumes others know what they know, showing egocentric thinking. Saying "Smarties" passes.

Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves the room. Anne moves the marble to her box. The child is asked where Sally will look for her marble.

In the Sally-Anne task, a child passes if they say Sally will look in the basket.

20 high-functioning children with ASD, with control groups of 27 children without a diagnosis and 14 children with Down syndrome.

85% of controls correctly identified where Sally would look, compared with only 20% of children with ASD, suggesting ToM deficits may be involved in ASD.

Toddlers who watched adults struggle and drop beads still placed the beads successfully. They imitated what the adult intended, suggesting very young children have a simple ToM.

Children heard that Maxi left chocolate in the blue cupboard and his mum moved it to the green cupboard. Nearly all 3-year-olds failed and most 4-year-olds passed.

False.

Participants saw greyscale photographs of the eye region only and chose the emotion word. Adults with ASD and HFASD struggled, suggesting ToM deficits link to ASD.

Sutton et al. (1999) found bullies need skilled social cognition and ToM to manipulate others, so this understanding could be used to address bullying behaviour.

Training programmes for social skills. Evaluations report improved social skills scores compared with standard schooling.

Success requires other cognitive abilities, especially memory, and a child can have a well-developed ToM (e.g. enjoying pretend play) and still fail.

Bloom and German note that a shortened Sally-Anne story is passed by many three-year-olds.

Perner et al. (2002) believe it develops with all cognitive abilities (a Piagetian view), whereas Astington (1998) suggests it is internalised through early interactions with adults (a Vygotskian view).

False.

Tager-Flusberg (2007) argues ToM difficulties are neither specific to ASD nor universal within it. Individuals with an Asperger profile pass false belief tasks easily.

Superior visual attention or highly systematic reasoning, suggesting ToM and ASD are not as closely linked as once believed.

Nature, as it suggests ToM is biologically hardwired. Vygotskian approaches suggest nurture is key, indicating an interactionist view.

It may unintentionally pathologise neurodivergent individuals. Labelling ToM deficits risks reinforcing stereotypes and stigmatisation.

Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire both when an individual performs an action and when they watch someone else perform the same action, mirroring motor activity in another individual.

While recording electrical activity in a macaque monkey's motor cortex, the same cells fired when the monkey reached for food as when it watched a researcher reach for his lunch.

The mirror neuron system has been localised to the inferior frontal gyrus of the brain (Kilner et al., 2009).

Mirror neurons have shaped human evolution. Complex social interactions require a brain system for understanding intention, emotion and perspective, without which humans could not live in large groups.

False.

Gallese and Goldman (1998) suggest they may also signal another person's intention, e.g. firing at the mere thought of a teacher about to clap.

fMRI research (Gallese, 2001) showed the anterior cingulate cortex and inferior frontal gyrus were activated when participants observed emotions in other people.

They are linked to emotional observation and enactment, enabling a child to understand that other people may feel differently from how they feel.

They may help the child learn how to navigate social interactions and understand social hierarchies and group systems.

The normal development of recognition, imitation, theory of mind, empathy and language.

The 'broken mirror' theory (Ramachandran & Oberman, 2006) proposes that dysfunction in the mirror neuron system prevents a developing child from imitating and understanding social behaviour in others.

In infancy, children later diagnosed with ASD mimic adult behaviour less. Later, they have difficulties reading social roles, intentions and emotions.

Dapretto et al. (2006) found children with autism showed no mirror neuron activity while observing and imitating facial expressions.

Mirror neurons let an observer understand the intention behind an observed act as well as its goal, and a deficit in the mirror mechanism underlies some aspects of ASD.

Participants watching films of people yawning showed considerable activity in Brodmann's area 9 in the right frontal lobe, an area believed to be rich in mirror neurons.

False.

Activity in the pars opercularis occurred before arousal, consistent with mirror neurons producing the perspective-taking that made the material arousing.

People with frontal lobe damage struggled to understand others' emotions and intentions, although this shows the importance of the region rather than of mirror neurons specifically.

If mirror neuron dysfunction contributes to ASD, it could inform therapeutic strategies for autistic people, although mixed evidence (Hadjikhani, 2007) makes this speculative.

We only know what mirror neurons should do in theory, so their existence is assumed rather than demonstrated, although single-cell recordings during surgery (Mukamel et al., 2010) suggest isolated mirror neurons exist.

Evidence for human mirror neurons comes from brain scanning, which identifies activity in regions of the brain, not individual cells.

Their activity may reflect using others' behaviour to plan our own actions, rather than understanding the cognitions behind theirs.

For ethical reasons, electrodes cannot be inserted into the human brain, so researchers must infer mirror neuron activity from regional activation.

True.

It implies empathy, imitation and understanding intentions are pre-programmed, leaving little conscious control and challenging free will.

Mirror neuron theory leans on nature, treating social understanding as innate, but nurture, especially early social experiences, plays a crucial role in developing ToM and empathy.