Hostname: page-component-5cf477f64f-bmd9x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-04T04:56:10.607Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Social cognition or social class and culture? On the interpretation of differences in social cognitive performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2019

David Dodell-Feder Open the ORCID record for David Dodell-Feder [Opens in a new window] ,
Kerry J. Ressler  and
Laura T. Germine
David Dodell-Feder*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA
Kerry J. Ressler
Affiliation:
Division of Depression and Anxiety, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA, USA Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Laura T. Germine
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Institute for Technology in Psychiatry, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA, USA
*
Author for correspondence: David Dodell-Feder, E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Background

The ability to understand others’ mental states carries profound consequences for mental and physical health, making efforts at validly and reliably assessing mental state understanding (MSU) of utmost importance. However, the most widely used and current NIMH-recommended task for assessing MSU – the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (RMET) – suffers from potential assessment issues, including reliance on a participant's vocabulary/intelligence and the use of culturally biased stimuli. Here, we evaluate the impact of demographic and sociocultural factors (age, gender, education, ethnicity, race) on the RMET and other social and non-social cognitive tasks in an effort to determine the extent to which the RMET may be unduly influenced by participant characteristics.

Methods

In total, 40 248 international, native-/primarily English-speaking participants between the ages of 10 and 70 completed one of five measures on TestMyBrain.org: RMET, a shortened version of RMET, a multiracial emotion identification task, an emotion discrimination task, and a non-social/non-verbal processing speed task (digit symbol matching).

Results

Contrary to other tasks, performance on the RMET increased across the lifespan. Education, race, and ethnicity explained more variance in RMET performance than the other tasks, and differences between levels of education, race, and ethnicity were more pronounced for the RMET than the other tasks such that more highly educated, non-Hispanic, and White/Caucasian individuals performed best.

Conclusions

These data suggest that the RMET may be unduly influenced by social class and culture, posing a serious challenge to assessing MSU in clinical populations given shared variance between social status and psychiatric illness.

Keywords

Mental state understandingreading the mind in the eyes taskresearch domain criteriasocial cognitiontheory of mind
Type
Original Articles
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 133 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, RB, Rule, NO, Franklin, RG, Wang, E, Stevenson, MT, Yoshikawa, S, Nomura, M, Sato, W, Kveraga, K and Ambady, N (2010) Cross-cultural reading the mind in the eyes: an fMRI investigation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22, 97–108.Google Scholar
Anagnostou, E, Soorya, L, Chaplin, W, Bartz, J, Halpern, D, Wasserman, S, Wang, AT, Pepa, L, Tanel, N, Kushki, A and Hollander, E (2012) Intranasal oxytocin versus placebo in the treatment of adults with autism spectrum disorders: a randomized controlled trial. Molecular Autism 3, 16.Google Scholar
Baker, CA, Peterson, E, Pulos, S and Kirkland, RA (2014) Eyes and IQ: a meta-analysis of the relationship between intelligence and ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’. Intelligence 44, 78–92.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S, Wheelwright, S, Hill, J, Raste, Y and Plumb, I (2001 a) The ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ test revised version: a study with normal adults, and adults with asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 42, 241–251.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S, Wheelwright, S, Spong, A, Scahill, V and Lawson, J (2001 b) Are intuitive physics and intuitive psychology independent? A test with children with Asperger Syndrome. Journal of Developmental and Learning Disorders 5, 47–78.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S, Bowen, DC, Holt, RJ, Allison, C, Auyeung, B, Lombardo, MV, Smith, P and Lai, M-C (2015) The ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ test: complete absence of typical sex difference in ~400 men and women with autism. Ed. H Yamasue PLoS ONE 10, e0136521.Google Scholar
Bell, MD, Fiszdon, JM, Greig, TC and Wexler, BE (2010) Social attribution test – multiple choice (SAT-MC) in schizophrenia: comparison with community sample and relationship to neurocognitive, social cognitive and symptom measures. Schizophrenia Research 122, 164–171.Google Scholar
Black, JE (2018) An IRT analysis of the reading the mind in the eyes test. Journal of Personality Assessment, 1–9. doi: 10.1080/00223891.2018.1447946.Google Scholar
Blatt, B, LeLacheur, SF, Galinsky, AD, Simmens, SJ and Greenberg, L (2010) Does perspective-taking increase patient satisfaction in medical encounters? Academic Medicine 85, 1445–1452.Google Scholar
Bora, E and Pantelis, C (2013) Theory of mind impairments in first-episode psychosis, individuals at ultra-high risk for psychosis and in first-degree relatives of schizophrenia: systematic review and meta-analysis. Schizophrenia Research 144, 31–36.Google Scholar
Bora, E, Yucel, M and Pantelis, C (2009) Theory of mind impairment in schizophrenia: meta-analysis. Schizophrenia Research 109, 1–9.Google Scholar
Bora, E, Bartholomeusz, C and Pantelis, C (2016) Meta-analysis of Theory of Mind (ToM) impairment in bipolar disorder. Psychological Medicine 46, 253–264.Google Scholar
Boyd, D, Hargittai, E, Schultz, J and Palfrey, J (2011) Why parents help their children lie to Facebook about age: unintended consequences of the ‘Children's Online Privacy Protection Act’. First Monday 16. Available at https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3850/3075.Google Scholar
Bradford, EEF, Jentzsch, I, Gomez, J-C, Chen, Y, Zhang, D and Su, Y (2018) Cross-cultural differences in adult theory of mind abilities: a comparison of native-English speakers and native-Chinese speakers on the self/other differentiation task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71, 2665–2676.Google Scholar
Chung, YS, Barch, D and Strube, M (2014) A meta-analysis of mentalizing impairments in adults with schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder. Schizophrenia Bulletin 40, 602–616.Google Scholar
Corcoran, R, Mercer, G and Frith, CD (1995) Schizophrenia, symptomatology and social inference: investigating ‘theory of mind’ in people with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research 17, 5–13.Google Scholar
Davies, M (2010) The corpus of contemporary American English as the first reliable monitor corpus of English. Literary and Linguistic Computing 25, 447–464.Google Scholar
Dickinson, D, Ramsey, ME and Gold, JM (2007) Overlooking the obvious: a meta-analytic comparison of digit symbol coding tasks and other cognitive measures in schizophrenia. Archives of General Psychiatry 64, 532.Google Scholar
Dodell-Feder, D and Tamir, DI (2018) Fiction reading has a small positive impact on social cognition: a meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 147, 1713–1727.Google Scholar
Dodell-Feder, D, Lincoln, SH, Coulson, JP and Hooker, CI (2013) Using fiction to assess mental state understanding: a New task for assessing theory of mind in adults. Ed. L Young PLoS ONE 8, e81279.Google Scholar
Dodell-Feder, D, DeLisi, LE and Hooker, CI (2014 a) Neural disruption to theory of mind predicts daily social functioning in individuals at familial high-risk for schizophrenia. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9, 1914–1925.Google Scholar
Dodell-Feder, D, Tully, LM, Lincoln, SH and Hooker, CI (2014 b) The neural basis of theory of mind and its relationship to social functioning and social anhedonia in individuals with schizophrenia. NeuroImage: Clinical 4, 154–163.Google Scholar
Dodell-Feder, D, Felix, S, Yung, MG and Hooker, CI (2016) Theory-of-mind-related neural activity for one's romantic partner predicts partner well-being. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 11, 593–603.Google Scholar
Fink, E, Begeer, S, Peterson, CC, Slaughter, V and de Rosnay, M (2015) Friendlessness and theory of mind: a prospective longitudinal study. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 33, 1–17.Google Scholar
Fried, LP (1998) Risk factors for 5-year mortality in older AdultsThe cardiovascular health study. JAMA 279, 585.Google Scholar
Garrido, L, Furl, N, Draganski, B, Weiskopf, N, Stevens, J, Tan, GC-Y, Driver, J, Dolan, RJ and Duchaine, B (2009) Voxel-based morphometry reveals reduced grey matter volume in the temporal cortex of developmental prosopagnosics. Brain 132, 3443–3455.Google Scholar
Germine, L and Hooker, CI (2011) Face emotion recognition is related to individual differences in psychosis-proneness. Psychological Medicine 41, 937–947.Google Scholar
Germine, L, Garrido, L, Bruce, L and Hooker, C (2011) Social anhedonia is associated with neural abnormalities during face emotion processing. NeuroImage 58, 935–945.Google Scholar
Germine, L, Nakayama, K, Duchaine, BC, Chabris, CF, Chatterjee, G and Wilmer, JB (2012) Is the Web as good as the lab? Comparable performance from Web and lab in cognitive/perceptual experiments. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 19, 847–857.Google Scholar
Glymour, MM and Manly, JJ (2008) Lifecourse social conditions and racial and ethnic patterns of cognitive aging. Neuropsychology Review 18, 223–254.Google Scholar
Goldstein, NJ, Vezich, IS and Shapiro, JR (2014) Perceived perspective taking: when others walk in our shoes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, 941–960.Google Scholar
Gur, RC and Gur, RE (2016) Social cognition as an RDoC domain. American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics 171, 132–141.Google Scholar
Hackman, DA, Farah, MJ and Meaney, MJ (2010) Socioeconomic status and the brain: mechanistic insights from human and animal research. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, 651–659.Google Scholar
Hartshorne, JK and Germine, L (2015) When does cognitive functioning peak? The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the life span. Psychological Science 26, 433–443.Google Scholar
Holt-Lunstad, J, Smith, TB, Baker, M, Harris, T and Stephenson, D (2015) Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, 227–237.Google Scholar
Imuta, K, Henry, JD, Slaughter, V, Selcuk, B and Ruffman, T (2016) Theory of mind and prosocial behavior in childhood: a meta-analytic review. Developmental Psychology 52, 1192–1205.Google Scholar
Johannesen, JK, Fiszdon, JM, Weinstein, A, Ciosek, D and Bell, MD (2018) The Social Attribution Task – Multiple Choice (SAT-MC): psychometric comparison with social cognitive measures for schizophrenia research. Psychiatry Research 262, 154–161.Google Scholar
Johnston, L, Miles, L and McKinlay, A (2008) A critical review of the eyes test as a measure of social-cognitive impairment. Australian Journal of Psychology 60, 135–141.Google Scholar
Kendler, KS (1996) Lifetime prevalence, demographic risk factors, and diagnostic validity of nonaffective psychosis as assessed in a US community sample: The National Comorbidity Survey. Archives of General Psychiatry 53, 1022.Google Scholar
Kim, HS, Shin, NY, Jang, JH, Kim, E, Shim, G, Park, HY, Hong, KS and Kwon, JS (2011) Social cognition and neurocognition as predictors of conversion to psychosis in individuals at ultra-high risk. Schizophrenia Research 130, 170–175.Google Scholar
Kirkland, RA, Peterson, E, Baker, CA, Miller, S and Pulos, S (2013) Meta-analysis reveals adult female superiority in ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test’. North American Journal of Psychology 15, 121–146.Google Scholar
Klindt, D, Devaine, M and Daunizeau, J (2017) Does the way we read others’ mind change over the lifespan? Insights from a massive web poll of cognitive skills from childhood to late adulthood. Cortex 86, 205–215.Google Scholar
Kohler, CG, Turner, TH, Bilker, WB, Brensinger, CM, Siegel, SJ, Kanes, SJ, Gur, RE and Gur, RC (2003) Facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia: intensity effects and error pattern. American Journal of Psychiatry 160, 1768–1774.Google Scholar
Kret, ME and De Gelder, B (2012) A review on sex differences in processing emotional signals. Neuropsychologia 50, 1211–1221.Google Scholar
Lee, H-S, Corbera, S, Poltorak, A, Park, K, Assaf, M, Bell, MD, Wexler, BE, Cho, Y-I, Jung, S, Brocke, S and Choi, K-H (2018) Measuring theory of mind in schizophrenia research: cross-cultural validation. Schizophrenia Research, 201, 187–195.Google Scholar
Longstreth, WT, Arnold, AM, Beauchamp, NJ, Manolio, TA, Lefkowitz, D, Jungreis, C, Hirsch, CH, O'Leary, DH and Furberg, CD (2005) Incidence, manifestations, and predictors of worsening white matter on serial cranial magnetic resonance imaging in the elderly: the cardiovascular health study. Stroke 36, 56–61.Google Scholar
Manly, JJ (2008) Critical issues in cultural neuropsychology: profit from diversity. Neuropsychology Review 18, 179–183.Google Scholar
Mason, MF and Morris, MW (2010) Culture, attribution and automaticity: a social cognitive neuroscience view. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 5, 292–306.Google Scholar
Masuda, T, Ellsworth, PC, Mesquita, B, Leu, J, Tanida, S and Van de Veerdonk, E (2008) Placing the face in context: cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, 365–381.Google Scholar
McDonald, S, Flanagan, S, Rollins, J and Kinch, J (2003) TASIT: a new clinical tool for assessing social perception after traumatic brain injury. The Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation 18, 219–238.Google Scholar
McLaughlin, KA, Breslau, J, Green, JG, Lakoma, MD, Sampson, NA, Zaslavsky, AM and Kessler, RC (2011) Childhood socio-economic status and the onset, persistence, and severity of DSM-IV mental disorders in a US national sample. Social Science & Medicine 73, 1088–1096.Google Scholar
Molenberghs, P, Johnson, H, Henry, JD and Mattingley, JB (2016) Understanding the minds of others: a neuroimaging meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 65, 276–291.Google Scholar
Moran, JM (2013) Lifespan development: the effects of typical aging on theory of mind. Behavioural Brain Research 237, 32–40.Google Scholar
Moran, JM, Jolly, E and Mitchell, JP (2012) Social-cognitive deficits in normal aging. Journal of Neuroscience 32, 5553–5561.Google Scholar
Muggeo, VMR (2003) Estimating regression models with unknown break-points. Statistics in Medicine 22, 3055–3071.Google Scholar
Muggeo, VMR (2008) Segmented: an R package to fit regression models with broken-line relationships. R News 8, 20–25.Google Scholar
Mungas, D, Reed, BR, Crane, PK, Haan, MN and González, H (2004) Spanish and English Neuropsychological Assessment Scales (SENAS): further development and psychometric characteristics. Psychological Assessment 16, 347–359.Google Scholar
National Advisory Mental Health Council Workgroup on Tasks and Measures for RDoC (2016) Behavioral Assessment Methods for RDoC Constructs: A Report by the National Advisory Mental Health Council Workgroup on Tasks and Measures for Research Domain Criteria (RDoC).Google Scholar
Nisbett, RE (2004) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why. New York: Nachdr. Free Press.Google Scholar
Olderbak, S, Wilhelm, O, Olaru, G, Geiger, M, Brenneman, MW and Roberts, RD (2015) A psychometric analysis of the reading the mind in the eyes test: toward a brief form for research and applied settings. Frontiers in Psychology 6, 1503.Google Scholar
Pedraza, O and Mungas, D (2008) Measurement in cross-cultural neuropsychology. Neuropsychology Review 18, 184–193.Google Scholar
Pennebaker, JW, Boyd, RL, Joran, K and Blackburn, K (2015) The Development and Psychometric Properties of LIWC2015. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Pinkham, AE, Penn, DL, Green, MF, Buck, B, Healey, K and Harvey, PD (2014) The social cognition psychometric evaluation study: results of the expert survey and RAND panel. Schizophrenia Bulletin 40, 813–823.Google Scholar
Pinkham, AE, Harvey, PD and Penn, DL (2018) Social cognition psychometric evaluation: results of the final validation study. Schizophrenia Bulletin 44, 737–748.Google Scholar
Pinkham, AE, Kelsven, S, Kouros, C, Harvey, PD and Penn, DL (2017) The effect of age, race, and sex on social cognitive performance in individuals with schizophrenia. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 205, 346–352.Google Scholar
Pitcher, D, Garrido, L, Walsh, V and Duchaine, BC (2008) Transcranial magnetic stimulation disrupts the perception and embodiment of facial expressions. Journal of Neuroscience 28, 8929–8933.Google Scholar
Prevost, M, Carrier, M-E, Chowne, G, Zelkowitz, P, Joseph, L and Gold, I (2014) The reading the mind in the eyes test: validation of a French version and exploration of cultural variations in a multi-ethnic city. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 19, 189–204.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2017) R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Salthouse, TA (1996) The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition. Psychological Review 103, 403–428.Google Scholar
Salthouse, TA (2004) What and when of cognitive aging. Current Directions in Psychological Science 13, 140–144.Google Scholar
Siedlecki, KL, Tucker-Drob, EM, Oishi, S and Salthouse, TA (2008) Life satisfaction across adulthood: different determinants at different ages? The Journal of Positive Psychology 3, 153–164.Google Scholar
Slaughter, V, Imuta, K, Peterson, CC and Henry, JD (2015) Meta-analysis of theory of mind and peer popularity in the preschool and early school years. Child Development 86, 1159–1174.Google Scholar
Todd, AR and Galinsky, AD (2014) Perspective-taking as a strategy for improving intergroup relations: evidence, mechanisms, and qualifications: perspective-taking and intergroup relations. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 8, 374–387.Google Scholar
Todd, AR, Bodenhausen, GV, Richeson, JA and Galinsky, AD (2011) Perspective taking combats automatic expressions of racial bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100, 1027–1042.Google Scholar
Walker, ER, McGee, RE and Druss, BG (2015) Mortality in mental disorders and global disease burden implications: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry 72, 334.Google Scholar
Warrier, V, Grasby, KL, Uzefovsky, F, Toro, R, Smith, P, Chakrabarti, B, Khadake, J, Mawbey-Adamson, E, Litterman, N, Hottenga, J-J, Lubke, G, Boomsma, DI, Martin, NG, Hatemi, PK, Medland, SE, Hinds, DA, Bourgeron, T and Baron-Cohen, S (2018) Genome-wide meta-analysis of cognitive empathy: heritability, and correlates with sex, neuropsychiatric conditions and cognition. Molecular Psychiatry 23, 1402–1409.Google Scholar
Zsembik, BA and Peek, MK (2001) Race differences in cognitive functioning among older adults. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 56, S266–S274.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Dodell-Feder et al. supplementary material

Dodell-Feder et al. supplementary material
Download Dodell-Feder et al. supplementary material(File)
File 1.1 MB