Social Cognition means a lot of things—-so what is it? And what is it related to?

The term "social cognition" is used frequently across psychology and neuroscience, but it is a complex and broad term that researchers often use to mean very different things. The definition we use is: the process of understanding and/or feeling others’ thoughts and emotions.

Across several large studies, we have begun to systematically examine a suite of behavioral assessments of social cognition including measures of emotion recognition, theory of mind, and empathic accuracy.

We have many research questions embedded in this work, but one is to try and understand overlapping and unique aspects of social cognition that are engaged through these tasks.

Recently, we found behavioral evidence that self-referential processing positively predicts social cognition in the form of theory of mind and empathic accuracy (Dinulescu et al., 2021). We are following up this study by investigating the relation between alexithymia and self-referential processing. In a very large effort across multiple studies and samples, we also found additional evidence that self-reported empathy and behavioral assessments of social cognition are generally unrelated.

Relevant Publications

Sunahara, C. S., Rosenfield, D., Alvi, T., Wallmark, Z., Lee, J., Fulford, D., & Tabak, B. A. (2022).  Revisiting the association between self-reported empathy and behavioral assessments of social cognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151, 3304-3322.

Tabak, B. A., Gupta, D., Sunahara, C. S., Alvi, T., Wallmark, Z., Fulford, D., Hudson, N. W., & Chmielewski, M. (2022). Environmental sensitivity predicts interpersonal sensitivity above and beyond Big Five personality traits. Journal of Research in Personality, 98, 104210.

Dinulescu, S., Alvi, T., Rosenfield, D., Sunahara, C. S., Lee, J., & Tabak, B. A. (2021). Self-referential processing predicts social cognitive ability. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12, 99-107.