Social Intelligence: from Brain to Culture

The article examines the cultural foundations of students’ social intelligence. It is noted that social intelligence is rooted in culture. In this sense, it is also considered as a socio-psychological phenomenon with a complex structure. Because a person engaged in social activities regularly encounters the influence of these and similar situations on social intelligence. In this sense, human activity in life has a social character in all areas. On the one hand, these areas demonstrate intellectual skills, knowledge and the ability to work on and master them. On the other hand, the ability to build relationships with other people in various social situations, character traits and behavior manifested in communication with acquaintances or strangers, in situations encountered in professional activities, determine the development of social intelligence. Therefore, everyone who wants to be in a social environment and is forced to act in it needs to enter into social relationships, comply with the requirements and norms of the social environment, acquire social skills and habits of role behavior in this area. It is noted that for many this process is a voluntary process of self-development, self-organization and socialization. As a result, such people can effectively develop their social intelligence. For this reason, the development of social intelligence among students preparing for professional activities is becoming in demand. The science of social psychology finds out how this process occurs, what needs to be done, and shows how to apply it. The article describes the progress of experiments carried out in this direction. The essence of the influence on the social intelligence of students at three levels is clarified - cognitive, emotional and behavioral. The results showed that among the participants in the experiment, the culturally determined formation of the behavioral component of social intelligence predominated. The results of the emotional component were lower than those of the behavioral component. Compared to them, the indicators of the cognitive component are significantly lower.

Pretrained language models have demonstrated outstanding performance in many NLP tasks recently. However, their social intelligence, which requires commonsense reasoning about the current situation and mental states of others, is still developing. Towards improving language models' social intelligence, in this study we focus on the Social IQA dataset, a task requiring social and emotional commonsense reasoning. Building on top of the pretrained RoBERTa and GPT2 models, we propose several architecture variations and extensions, as well as leveraging external commonsense corpora, to optimize the model for Social IQA. Our proposed system achieves competitive results as those top-ranking models on the leaderboard. This work demonstrates the strengths of pretrained language models, and provides viable ways to improve their performance for a particular task.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the evidence concerning mirror self-recognition as a measure of self-awareness and examine its applicability to schizophrenia. The evidence suggests that the ability to identify yourself correctly in a mirror is not only related to the capacity to conceive of yourself, but may also be related to your ability to take into account what other individuals may know, want or intend to do. This ability to make accurate inferences about mental states in others (known as mental state attribution, theory of mind or social intelligence) begins to emerge during childhood at the same point in time as mirror self-recognition. Species that fail to recognize themselves in mirrors fail to show any evidence that they can infer mental states in one another. Also consistent with the proposition that these phenomena go hand in hand, recent neuropsychological evidence shows that self-awareness and mental state attribution in humans appear to be a byproduct of brain activity that is related to the frontal cortex. As detailed here and elsewhere in this volume, there is growing evidence that both self-awareness and mental state attribution is impaired in schizophrenic patients and that schizophrenia may be related to frontal lobe dysfunction. Mirror self-recognition Mirrors have a number of unique psychological properties. In principle, mirrors represent a means of seeing yourself as you are seen by others. In front of a mirror you are literally an audience to your own behaviour.

Humans live in complex social environments. By the time they reach adulthood, most people have developed highly sophisticated social skills, including the ability to infer the 'invisible' mental states in others, and to act upon those inferences; they have become experts at 'social chess'. This paper draws upon research from developmental and evolutionary psychology, primatology, as well as studies of autistic children, to explore the processes by which children acquire the complex skills underpinning social interaction. It also examines obstacles to social skill acquisition. In light of ethological studies of social play in humans and other primates, it is argued that play is a fundamental medium for acquiring social skills.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer the mental states of others, is integral to facilitating healthy social interactions. People can reason about the mental states of others even with limited or (sometimes) inconsistent information. However, little is known about how people make inferences about the mental states of others under uncertainty, and what features of information are important in aiding mental state reasoning. In the current study, we conducted three unique experiments that alter participant's uncertainty when engaging in ToM tests. In Experiment 1, we simultaneously manipulated both the amount and consistency of information available in social stimuli presented to 59 participants. In Experiments 2 and 3, we aimed to decipher which feature of social stimuli is more conducive to mental state reasoning. Experiment 2 manipulated only the amount of information available to 47 participants, while Experiment 3 manipulated only the consistency of information available to 46 participants. Using both frequentist and Bayesian statistics, results confirmed that manipulating the amount and consistency of information alters ToM performance. Exploratory analysis comparing the effects of the amount and consistency of information suggests that the effects of the consistency of information seem to be stronger than those of the amount of information. Taken together, all three experiments suggest that while both the amount and consistency of information are important features of social stimuli-the consistency of information available is more salient when inferring mental states of others. These findings are discussed in relation to information theory and have important implications for creating enriched social stimuli, which may enhance mental state reasoning in individuals with social deficits.

Oxytocin Improves “Mind-Reading” in Humans

Relevance. The introduction of new information and psychological and pedagogical technologies stipulates a need to train professional specialists who can easily interact with the team and society. Therefore, it remains important to develop human qualities that will help to understand the behaviour and activities of people in different situations.Purpose. The aim of the work was to determine a student�s level of social intelligence, to identify ways of improving it and to define the state of this criterion in society.Methodology. The study used questionnaires and observations, and the training process involved students from different educational institutions. It is important to note that a low level of social intelligence was prevalent in most students in the study, demonstrating those who are insufficiently confident, conflicted and who do not fully understand the behaviour of others.Results. First, the authors highlighted the state and level of understanding of what is social intelligence. Secondly, the students singled out some qualities that they think develop this concept. The researchers described the influence of the level of communication qualities on the level of social intelligence and showed that the more communicative the person, the higher the level of social intelligence.Conclusions. The authors also demonstrated that training workshops and classes based on improving social communication, adaptation and interaction with the community had a positive impact on the development of social intelligence.

Structural and functional brain correlates of theory of mind impairment post-stroke

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience - Commentary on a target paper by Andy Clark, “Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2012)

Perception of other people’s mental states affects humor in social anxiety

The purpose of this study was to examine the usefulness of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) for identifying abnormalities in prefrontal brain activity in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as they inferred the mental states of others. The subjects were 16 children with ASD aged between 8 and 14 years and 16 age-matched healthy control children. Oxygenated hemoglobin concentration was measured in the subject's prefrontal brain region on NIRS during tasks expressing a person's mental state (MS task) and expressing an object's characteristics (OC task). There was a significant main effect of group (ASD vs control), with the control group having more activity than the ASD group. But there was no significant main effect of task (MS task vs OC task) or hemisphere (right vs left). Significant interactions of task and group were found, with the control group showing more activity than the ASD group during the MS task relative to the OC task. NIRS showed that there was lower activity in the prefrontal brain area when children with ASD performed MS tasks. Therefore, clinicians might be able to use NIRS and these tasks for conveniently detecting brain dysfunction in children with ASD related to inferring mental states, in the clinical setting.

Sociometric status is of consequence to the child’s development and adjustment, as research shows that people with low status in childhood and adolescence run a greater risk of later maladjustment. On the other hand, popularity is a significant predictor of well-being as well as academic success and effective intra- and interpersonal functioning. Given the importance of sociometric status to a person’s psychological and social functioning, researchers have sought to identify its determinants with a view to developing methods of supporting children’s development and adjustment. The objective of the study was to investigate changes in the sociometric status of children in a new classroom and determine to what extent they are shaped by cognitive, social, and emotional intelligence. Method: The study encompassed 136 first graders aged six and seven years (M = 6,87, SD = 0.54). Sociometric status was evaluated three times: at the beginning of the school year, as well as after six and twelve months. In addition, one test of cognitive, social, and emotional intelligence was performed. The data were analyzed using latent growth curve models. Results: It was found that the sociometric status of children changed over time. Cognitive intelligence was not found to be a statistically significant predictor of either the initial level or the rate of change of sociometric status (whether in the acceptance or rejection domains). Emotional intelligence was significant only for the initial rejection by their peers. While social intelligence did not statistically significantly predict initial levels of acceptance and rejection, it did have a significant effect on the rate of temporal change in both domains of sociometric status. This means that children with higher SI improved their position in the peer group over time (with increasing acceptance and declining rejection levels). Conclusions: The research shows that by developing social intelligence, it is possible to help children with a low sociometric status, who do not cope well in a social group and are often rejected by their peers.

The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test was developed by Baron-Cohen and his co-workers. This test provides them the unique opportunity to evaluate social cognition assessing the ability to recognize the mental state of others using only the expressions around the eyes. In healthy populations, however, it has produced conflicting results, particularly regarding sex differences and number of items to use. In this study we performed two studies: The first one investigated the presence of gender effects and the sensitivity of test stimuli; the second one considered other individual factors (i.e., artistic attitude, social empathy and personality traits) that could influence the ability to understand emotions from gaze. Our results demonstrated a sex effect, which can be more or less attenuated by the nature of the stimuli. This could be as aforementioned the result of the following, empathy or artistic attitude in being proficient in understanding the mental states of others.

Spitefulness and deficits in the social–perceptual and social–cognitive components of Theory of Mind

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been implicated in seemingly disparate cognitive functions, such as understanding the minds of other people and processing information about the self. This functional overlap would be expected if humans use their own experiences to infer the mental states of others, a basic postulate of simulation theory. Neural activity was measured while participants attended to either the mental or physical aspects of a series of other people. To permit a test of simulation theory's prediction that inferences based on self-reflection should only be made for similar others, targets were subsequently rated for their degree of similarity to self. Parametric analyses revealed a region of the ventral mPFC--previously implicated in self-referencing tasks--in which activity correlated with perceived self/other similarity, but only for mentalizing trials. These results suggest that self-reflection may be used to infer the mental states of others when they are sufficiently similar to self.