Social cognition in schizophrenia.

The study of social cognition in schizophrenia may augment the understanding of clinical and behavioral manifestations of the disorder. In this article, the authors describe social cognition and differentiate it from nonsocial cognition. They garner evidence to support the role of social cognition in schizophrenia: Nonsocial information-processing models are limited to explain social dysfunction in schizophrenia, measures of social cognition may contribute greater variance to social functioning than measures of nonsocial cognition, task performance on nonsocial-cognitive measures may not parallel performance on social-cognitive tasks, and symptomatology may be best understood within a social-cognitive framework. They describe the potential implications of a social-cognitive model of schizophrenia for the etiology and development of the disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Methods of skill selection in social skills training: A review.

32 social skills training studies utilizing a social learning or social-cognitive approach and published between 1980 and 1984 were reviewed with respect to methods used to select skills targeted for training. Operational definitions of social skills selection methods were used to classify studies on 2 dimensions—type of social validity and degree of individualization. A gap between recommended methods for selecting skills for inclusion in social skills training programs and actual research practices was found. Of the 32 studies reviewed, 18 reported no prior empirical evidence that the targeted skills were socially valid and 20 did not report an attempt to verify that trainees were deficient in the targeted skills prior to treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparison of social problem solving of children from open and traditional classrooms: A two-year longitudinal study.

Examined the hypothesized relation between open classrooms and children's social problem-solving performance by comparing, over a 2-yr period, the social problem-solving cognitions of 2 groups of children who had attended open and traditional classrooms, respectively, for 3 yrs. Ss in Phase 1 were 60 children (average age 9.5 yrs) from open classrooms and 60 matched chidren from traditional classrooms; 40 Ss from open classrooms and 40 Ss from traditional classrooms who had participated in Phase 1 were eligible to serve in Phase 2. The 8 open and 8 traditional classrooms used in the study were found to be different treatment groups based on ratings of openness and restrictiveness. The prediction of a relation between the open classroom and greater social problem-solving cognitions in children was based on previous research suggesting that the social-cognitive climate of the open classroom is more conducive to children's independent decision making and initiative. Multivariate analyses of repeated measures showed that open-classroom Ss had higher scores in social problem-solving cognitions and correspondingly higher scores in self-esteem and ego-strength. Educational implications of the findings are discussed in terms of the social-cognitive climate of open and restrictive classrooms and their effect on children's social-cognitive development. Limitations of the nonequivalent, nonrandomized group design used in the present study are also discussed. (48 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social cognition and social competence in adolescence.

Investigated whether social cognition is related to effective social behavior, using 2 samples of 9th and 12th graders as Ss. Social competence was defined as the attainment of relevant social goals in specified social contexts, using appropriate means and resulting in positive development. The social goal chosen was being able to behave effectively in challenging social situations involving salient social objects. Nine measures of social cognition and 4 other measures were used to predict 4 measures of social competence, each dealing with performance in specific challenging social situations. Taken together, these predictors accounted for a large proportion of variance in social competence, especially when a composite criterion was used. Significant age and sex differences were obtained for many of the predictor and criterion variables, and there also appeared to be important developmental differences in the validity of social competence judgments. Factor analysis results suggested that social competence represents a domain of human functioning that is at least partly distinguishable from a cognitive or general competence domain. These results were substantially replicated in a 2nd sample. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Naturalistic social cognition: Methodology, assessment, and validation.

Developed the expanded dyadic interaction paradigm, a research paradigm for the study of naturalistic social cognition, and examined whether the paradigm can be used to obtain reliable and valid measures of the actual thoughts and feelings that individuals experience in unstructured dyadic interactions. The paradigm's utility in empirically revealing the ways in which social behavior and social cognition are related in unstructured, dyadic interactions was also assessed. Data from 31 female and 29 male undergraduates provide evidence for the interrater reliability and the construct validity (i.e., face and content validity, concurrent validity, divergent and convergent validity) of the thought and feeling measures obtained by this procedure. The degree of Ss' behavioral involvement in their interactions was related to a number of thought–feeling indices (e.g., total number of entries, percentage of positive partner entries), and its relations with the percentages of positive, neutral, and negative entries were further moderated by internal correspondence and private self-consciousness. Some parallels in the behavioral and thought–feeling correlates of gender were noted (e.g., females' affective tone of their thoughts and feelings was more positive and less negative than that of males). (72 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concomitants of social support: Social skills, physical attractiveness, and gender.

Investigated the naturally occurring relations among self-reported social support and social skills, on the one hand, and behavioral measures and rated physical attractiveness on the other, using 84 male and 84 female undergraduates who were selected on the basis of high- and low-number scores on the Social Support Questionnaire. Ss were videotaped in 2 dyadic situations with a same-sex partner. Ss also completed the UCLA Loneliness Questionnaire, a social competence questionnaire, a story completion task, and self and partner evaluations. The videotaped behavior was rated qualitatively and quantitatively. Results show significant differences in the social skills of Ss who were high and low in social support; Ss high in social support were more favorably evaluated. Women also were found to be significantly more socially skilled and were rated as being more physically attractive than men. The various self-report and behavioral measures of social skills were significantly interrelated. Results indicate the dimensions of social support by demonstrating the relation between social support and social skills. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Correlates of social problem solving during the first year after traumatic brain injury in children.

Effects of pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) on social problem-solving were examined in a longitudinal study of 103 children with moderate-to-severe TBI (n = 52) or orthopedic injury (OI; n = 51) using the Interpersonal Negotiation Strategies task (INS). Children solved age-appropriate hypothetical social conflicts, with responses for four problem-solving steps scored by developmental level. The OI group performed better than the TBI group, but rate of change in performance over time did not differ between groups, suggesting improvement in children with TBI was not due to recovery from injury. Strong relations between INS performance and memory and language skills emerged, but emotional processing was only weakly related to INS performance. Frontal focal lesions influenced INS performance in younger (but not older) children with TBI. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), revealed strong relationships between the INS and increased apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) measures indexing connectivity in the dorsolateral and cingulate regions in both TBI and OI groups, and in the temporal and parietal regions in the TBI group. These findings inform studies of social problem-solving skills during the first year post TBI. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relations between preschool activity and aspects of intellectual and social behavior at age 71/2.

Explored the relations between preschool high activity and school-age behavior in 120 Ss at age 21/2 and in 62 of them at age 71/2. Two reliable clusters of observed behaviors, activity level and social participation, were associated with teacher ratings of vigorous, high-active play. These 2 factors and the activity ratings were significantly related to behavior at age 71/2. For both boys and girls, vigorous, high activity showed considerable stability over 5 yrs. Vigorous, intense behavior expressed by high activity levels was negatively related to various measures of cognitive and intellective performance at age 71/2 (WISC, Children's Embedded Figures Test, and Siegel Sorting Task). Vigorous, intense behavior as expressed in social participation was positively related to the same measures of intellectual performance. The activity level component was highly related to an index of minor physical anomalies, whereas the social participation component was not. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

At the boundaries of automaticity: Negation as reflective operation.

The present research investigated whether automatic social-cognitive skills are based on the same representations and processes as their controlled counterparts. Using the cognitive task of negating valence, the authors demonstrate that enhanced practice in negating the valence of a stimulus can lead to changes in the underlying associative representation. However, procedural, rule-based components of negations were generally unaffected by practice (Experiments 1-3). Moreover, negations of evaluative stimuli did not influence automatic evaluative responses to these stimuli, unless the negation was included in the associative representation of a stimulus (Experiments 4-6). These results suggest that some practice-related skill improvements are limited to conditions in which a general procedure can be substituted by the retrieval of results of previous applications from associative memory. Implications for research on automaticity and social cognition are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The quality of sibling relationships and the development of social competence and behavioral control in aggressive children.

To understand the relations between sibling interactions and the social adjustment of children with behavior problems, 53 aggressive 1st- and 2nd-grade children, their mothers, and their siblings were interviewed about positive and negative aspects of the sibling relationship. When conflict and warmth were considered together, 3 types of sibling dyads emerged: conflictual ( high levels of conflict, low levels of warmth ), involved ( moderate levels of conflict and warmth ), and supportive ( low levels of conflict, high levels of warmth ) . On most measures of social adjustment at school, children in involved sibling relationships showed better adjustment than did children in conflictual relationships. Results are discussed in terms of a developmental model for at-risk children in which some sibling relationships may foster the development of social skills in addition to providing emotional support, which may enhance adjustment at school. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The dyadic nature of social information processing in boys' reactive and proactive aggression.

The correlation between boys' social cognitions and their aggressive behavior toward peers was examined as being actor driven, partner driven, or dyadic relationship driven. Eleven groups of 6 familiar boys each (N?=?165 dyads) met for 5 consecutive days to participate in play sessions and social-cognitive interviews. With a variance partitioning procedure, boys' social-cognitive processes were found to vary reliably across their dyadic relationships. Furthermore, mixed models regression analyses indicated that hostile attributional biases toward a particular peer were related to directly observed reactive aggression toward that peer even after controlling for actor and partner effects, suggesting that these phenomena are dyadic or relationship oriented. On the other hand, the relation between outcome expectancies for aggression and the display of proactive aggression appeared to be more actor driven and partner driven that dyadic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceived social support, social skills, and quality of relationships in bulimic women.

The impaired relationship between bulimics and their environment may be an important factor in the onset and perpetuation of bulimia. This study explored specific aspects of the bulimic's social network and interpersonal relationships as well as individual difference variables that might mediate her ability to support or perceive this as adequate. Ss were 21 bulimic women and 21 control Ss who completed self-report measures assessing perceived social support, the quality of relationships, social skills, and psychopathology. Bulimics reported less perceived support from friends and family, more negative interactions and conflict, and less social competence. Differences in negative interactions remained significant after controlling for overall psychopathology, and level of conflict was an important predictor of group membership. In addition, bulimics were rated as less socially effective by observers unaware of their group membership. Results highlight the need for further investigation of the quality and type of interactions in bulimic women's lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Moral and social reasoning and perspective taking in later life: A longitudinal study.

In this study 27 older adults (ages 64–80) and 23 middle-aged adults (ages 35–54) were tested for moral stage, integrative complexity of social reasoning, and perspective-taking levels twice over a 4 year period. Moral reasoning stage levels did not change over time for either age group. Older adults, but not the middle-aged, showed a significant decline over time in level of moral perspective taking. Complexity of reasoning about several interpersonal social issues declined modestly in both age groups. More social-cognitive support, a higher education level, and better self-reported health were all found to be protective factors in forestalling declines in mature adults' sociocognitive reasoning, consistent with other research on cognitive measures in later life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social isolation and social problem solving: A longitudinal study.

Investigated the social problem-solving (SPS) abilities of 72 children who were observed to interact infrequently with their peers. In Study 1, the stability of isolate and social behavior was examined. Ss were administered an SPS test in kindergarten and again in Grade 1, and relations between the observed frequency of isolate and social play and SPS were computed. Isolate and social behaviors were found to be moderately stable from kindergarten to Grade 1. Moreover, both quantitative and qualitative indexes of SPS competence correlated (concurrently and predictively) in a negative direction with the observed frequency of isolate play and in a positive direction with social play. In Study 2, the relations between frequency of isolate and social play and naturalistic SPS skills were examined. The data revealed that nonassertive, compliant SPS strategies observed in kindergarten correlated concurrently, but moderately, with isolate play in kindergarten and predictively with isolate play in Grade 1. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social interaction skills and theory of mind in young children.

Two studies explored relations between peer social skills and theory of mind in young children. In Study 1, a global teacher rating of social skills with peers, performance on a traditional false-belief task, a standardized assessment of auditory language comprehension, and a time sampling of amount of speech with peers were obtained. Positive, but moderate, zero-order correlations were observed between the false-belief measure and social skills, and false belief accounted for a significant amount of additional variance in social skills after covarying age and the 2 measures of language. Study 2 replicated the findings of Study 1 by using a larger sample and a standardized teacher questionnaire. The results are discussed with regard to the critical role of a mentalistic theory of behavior for human social interactions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age

At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various ways. These behaviors have mostly been studied separately. In the current study, we investigated the most important of these behaviors together as they emerged in a single group of 24 infants between 9 and 15 months of age. At each of seven monthly visits, we measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation of two different kinds of actions on objects, imperative and declarative gestures, and comprehension and production of language. We also measured several nonsocial-cognitive skills as a point of comparison. We report two studies. The focus of the first study was the initial emergence of infants' social-cognitive skills and how these skills are related to one another developmentally. We found a reliable pattern of emergence: Infants progressed from sharing to following to directing others' attention and behavior. The nonsocial skills did not emerge predictably in this developmental sequence. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that the ages of emergence of all pairs of the social-cognitive skills or their components were inter-related. The focus of the second study was the social interaction of infants and their mothers, especially with regard to their skills of joint attentional engagement (including mothers' use of language to follow into or direct infants' attention) and how these skills related to infants' early communicative competence. Our measures of communicative competence included not only language production, as in previous studies, but also language comprehension and gesture production. It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of social-cognitive development, for theories of language development, and for theories of the process by means of which human children become fully participating members of the cultural activities and processes into which they are born.     

A comparison of social skills in delinquent and nondelinquent adolescent girls using a behavioral role-playing inventory.

Delinquent behavior in adolescent girls may be related to deficits in social skills; that is, some girls may behave maladaptively because they lack the skills to perform more competently. During the 1st phase of this research, the Problem Inventory for Adolescent Girls (PIAG) was developed to measure competence in social situations. The 2nd phase of the research compared the performance of carefully matched groups of 29 delinquent and 29 nondelinquent girls (mean age 16.25 yrs) on the inventory. The PIAG significantly discriminated between the groups; 40 of the 52 individual items also discriminated between the delinquent and nondelinquent Ss. 10 of the 12 nondiscriminating items were those for which the criteria had been developed by teenagers. This suggests that delinquency is more closely related to skill deficits in interacting with adult authority figures than to skill deficits with peers. Items on the inventory generally were independent of one another and lacked an interpretable clustering pattern. A discriminant analysis yielded a function that resulted in 85% of the Ss being correctly assigned to their appropriate delinquent or nondelinquent group on the basis of their performance on the inventory. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Naturalistic social cognition: Empathic accuracy in mixed-sex dyads.

The research paradigm that W. Ickes and his colleagues (e.g., Ickes et al; see record 1986-27142-001) developed for the study of naturalistic social cognition was used to explore the phenomenon of empathic accuracy in the initial, unstructured interactions of 38 mixed-sex (male–female) dyads. The results indicated that an important aspect of empathic accuracy, content accuracy, could be measured reliably (α?=?.94) with the procedure used. The results further indicated that content accuracy was, to a large extent, an emergent product of social interaction processes occurring at the level of the dyad. Although many of the findings could be explained in informational terms, some significant motivational influences were observed as well. For example, content accuracy was influenced by the partner's physical attractiveness and, more generally, by the perceiver's apparent interest in the partner (as indexed by various thought/feeling measures). The individual difference variables of grade point average (GPA) and self-monitoring also predicted the subjects' levels of content accuracy; however, gender and self-report measures of empathic skills and empathic accuracy did not. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Discrimination of two aspects of cognitive-social intelligence from academic intelligence.

The present study proposed a theoretical division of cognitive-social intelligence into declarative and procedural social knowledge (crystallized social knowledge) and flexible knowledge application aspects (social-cognitive flexibility) distinct from academic problem solving. Pictorial, verbal, self-, and teacher report measures of social-cognitive flexibility, crystallized social knowledge, and academic problem solving were collected for 169 high school seniors (102 girls and 67 boys) in a multitrait-multimethod study. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the discriminability of social-cognitive flexibility from academic problem solving and crystallized social knowledge. Crystallized social knowledge was not discriminable from academic problem solving. Significant correlations between these factors and teacher reports of social behavior confirmed that flexible application of social knowledge is an important aspect of social competence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social skills, social outcomes, and cognitive features of childhood social phobia.

Social skills, social outcomes, self-talk, outcome expectancies, and self-evaluation of performance during social-evaluative tasks were examined with 27 clinically diagnosed social phobic children ages 7–14 and a matched nonclinical group. Results showed that, compared with their nonanxious peers, social phobic children demonstrated lower expected performance and a higher level of negative self-talk on social-evaluative tasks. In addition, social phobic children showed social skills deficits as assessed by self- and parent report, an assertiveness questionnaire, and direct behavioral observation. Furthermore, compared with the control group, social phobic children were rated by themselves and others as significantly less socially competent with peers and were found to be less likely to receive positive outcomes from peers during behavioral observation. Implications for the assessment and treatment of childhood social phobia are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)