Social Cognition And The Second Person In Human Interaction

This book is a unique exploration of the idea of the "second person" in human interaction, the idea that face-to-face interactions involve a distinctive form of reciprocal mental state attributions that mediates their dynamical unfolding. Challenging the view of mental attribution as a sort of "theory of mind", Pérez and Gomila argue that the second person perspective of mental understanding is the conceptually, ontogenetically, and phylogenetically basic way of understanding mentality. Second person interaction provides the opportunity for the acquisition of concepts of mental states of increasing complexity. The book reviews the growing interest in a variety of second person phenomena, both in development and in adulthood, presenting research that shows how participants in human interaction attribute psychological states of a referentially transparent kind to each other. This review documents the spontaneous preference for face-to-face interaction, from eye contact to joint attention, from forms of vitality to communicative intentions, from interaction detection to joint action, and from synchrony to interpersonal coordination. Also looking at the implications and applications of the second person perspective within fields as diverse as art and morality, this book is fascinating reading for students and academics in social and cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy.

Social cognition is an area of social psychology that has been flourishing over the past two decades. It has harnessed basic concepts from cognitive psychology and developed and refined them to explain human thinking, feeling, and acting in a social context. Moreover, social cognition has integrated emotional influences and unconscious processes to reach a more complete understanding of social psychological phenomena. In this volume, the reader will find a representative sample of outstanding research in the field of social cognition. The chapters address its central themes, roughly organized along the temporal axis of information processing. They include basic operations like perception, categorization, representation, and judgmental inferences. Other chapters focus on issues like social comparison, emotion, language and culture. All of the contributors are internationally-renowned experts who share with the reader their accounts of the research experience in each of their domains. Social Cognition: The Basis of Human Interaction is an invaluable resource for researchers requiring a comprehensive, yet concise, overview of the field, and may also be used by intermediate and advanced students of social cognition.

Language is the essence of interpersonal behavior and social relationships, and it is social cognitive processes that determine how we produce and understand language. However, there has been surprisingly little interest in the past linking social cognition and communication. This book presents the latest cutting-edge research from a select group of leading international scholars investigating the how language shapes our thinking, and how social cognitive processes in turn influence language production and communication. The chapters represent diverse perspectives of investigating the links between language and communication, including evolutionary, linguistic, cognitive and affective approaches as well as the empirical analysis of written and spoken narratives. New methodologies are presented including the latest techniques of text analysis to illuminate the psychology of individual language users, and entire cultures and societies. The chapters address such questions as how are cognitive and identity processes reflected in language? How do affective states influence language production? Are political correctness norms in language use effective? How do partners manage to accommodate to each other’s communicative expectations? What is the role of language as a medium of interpersonal and intergroup influence? How are individual and cultural identities reflected in, and shaped by narratives in literature, school texts and the media? The book is aimed at all students, researchers and laypersons interested in the interplay between thinking and communication, and should be required reading for all professionals who use language in their everyday work to interact with people.

Explores the cognitive mechanisms underlying the development of human social interactive abilities across the lifespan, in healthy and atypical development. Combines traditionally separate bodies of research into one coherent volume, following the trajectory of communication over the entire lifespan from infancy to old age. Crosses multiple disciplines, drawing together expertise from researchers in psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, linguistics, and philosophy. Brings together key methodologies and debates in a vibrant and fast-growing field. Written in an accessible style and suited to a wide range of readers, including academics and students of cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, related sciences and social sciences, as well as practitioners working in the fields of social care, mental health, and education

Originally published in 1988, the purpose of this book was to explore the interrelations among communication, social cognition and affect. The contributors, selected by the editors, were some of the best known in their fields and they significantly added to the knowledge of this interdisciplinary domain at the time. In late April 1986 the authors met at a conference centre at the University of Kentucky. They presented first drafts of their chapters and exchanged ideas. Out of these interactions came this book, which has a broad interest across several areas of psychology and communication. While answering a number of questions, the authors also posed others for future examination.

How do people think about the world? How do individuals make sense of their complex social environment? What are the underlying mechanisms that determine our understanding of the social world? Social cognition - the study of the specific cognitive processes that are involved when we think about the social world - attempts to answer these questions. Social cognition is an increasingly important and influential area of social psychology, impacting on areas such as attitude change and person perception. This introductory textbook provides the student with comprehensive coverage of the core topics in the field: how social information is encoded, stored and retrieved from memory; how social knowledge is structured and represented; and what processes are involved when individuals form judgements and make decisions. The overall aim is to highlight the main concepts and how they interrelate, providing the student with an insight into the whole social cognition framework. With this in mind, the first two chapters provide an overview of the sequence of information processing and outline general principles. Subsequent chapters build on these foundations by providing more in-depth discussion of memory, judgemental heuristics, the use of information, hypothesis-testing in social interaction and the interplay of affect and cognition. Social Cognition will be essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, communication studies, and sociology.

This book draws inspiration from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of intercorporeality to offer a new, multidisciplinary perspective on the body. By drawing attention to the body's ability to simultaneously sense and be sensed, Merleau-Ponty transcends the object-subject divide and describes how bodies are about, into, and within other bodies. Such inherent relationality constitutes the essence of intercorporeality, and the chapters in this book examine such relationality from a host of diverse perspectives. The book begins with an introductory chapter in which the editors review the current research on bodily interaction, and introduce the notion of intercorporeality as a potentially integrative framework. The first section then offers four chapters devoted to clarifying theoretical and developmental perspectives on intercorporeality. Section 2 contains three chapters that provide insight on intercorporeality from evolutionary, historical, and cross-sectional perspectives. In Section 3, four chapters examine the intercorporeal nature of meaning-making during human interaction. Section 4 then presents three chapters that explore the intercorporeal nature of multi-agent interactions and the role that non-animate bodies (i.e., objects) play in such interaction. Throughout all the chapters, the authors work to integrate research in their specific discipline into the larger, transdisciplinary notion of intercorporeality. This collection provides an indisputably unique perspective on bodies-in-interaction, while simultaneously offering an interdisciplinary way forward in contemporary scholarship on bodies, meaning, and interaction.

If we want to understand people’s responses to threats in social interactions we can distinguish between three levels of analysis: On a social level of analysis we can describe people’s interpersonal behavior, on a cognitive level we can identify corresponding information processing mechanisms, and on a neural level we can specify neural systems, which underlie these processes. In this Research Topic we want to present research connecting these three levels of analysis and propose their functional interconnection in social interaction. We propose that threats in social interactions activate basic motivational processes, which manifest in neural processes related to behavioral inhibition vs. activation in a social situation. This shapes our attention to new information, and affects our cognitions about social identities, belief systems and worldviews. These changes in social cognition in turn affect people’s behavior in social interactions and lead to corresponding reactions on behalf of the interaction partner. Thus, we assume that people’s reactions to threat in interactions can be described as sequences of broader attentional processes resulting from basic motivational tendencies leading to specific social cognitions and subsequent behavior within social interactions. We can analyze this sequence in order to contribute to a better understanding of social interactions. The three levels of analyses (social, cognitive, neural) shed light on social interactions from different angles: On the social level we can analyze how the behaviors of the interaction partners mutually affect each other and how this is accompanied by specific cognitive, emotional and motivational processes. On the cognitive level we can analyze people’s perception of a social situation leading to attentional and reasoning processes with regard to their interaction partner/s, which may be accompanied by certain emotional and motivational processes and determines the behavior towards the partner/s. Finally, we can focus on the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes in social interactions.