Does the public accurately perceive how views change in society? Prevailing narratives suggest not, but we argue this conclusion stems from searching for the wrong kind of accuracy—demanding pollster-like precision instead of acknowledging the public’s robust perception of the ‘gist’ of change. Re-analyzing three large studies (total N = 2,236), we show that collective perceptions of change are incredibly consistent across different measurement methods (r > 0.90) and, critically, are highly aligned with actual historical data (r > 0.70). This collective wisdom is underpinned by a robust, individual-level ability to perceive the direction and relative force of these shifts. Moreover, there is a clear pattern to the minority of attitudes for which perceptions of change were inaccurate. We conclude that the public possesses a robust gist-based judgment that accurately tracks how various political attitudes have changed.

This research explores a phenomenon that we see nearly every day and has implications for how we view people in other nations: Different media outlets may report the same international events either in terms of the nation (e.g., “Russia invades Ukraine”) or in terms of the leader (e.g., “Putin invades Ukraine”). Five studies, conducted during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine Conflict and involving both field and experimental data, find that readers of nation-framed news about the conflict had worse impressions of the people in the associated nation (Russians) than readers of the corresponding leader-framed version. We explain the psychology behind this framing effect and identify its moderators. Our research underscores the importance of responsible media practices in shaping global perceptions.

Previous literature suggests that in masculinized domains, a stereotypical portrayal of women has a negative impact on society’s perception of them. However, the influence of media representation on people’s perceptions of athletes depending on their gender, as well as its possible consequences for both men and women, remains unexplored in the sports sphere. Through two experimental studies employing a scenario methodology, we aimed to address this gap in the literature: In Study 1 (N = 190), we tested the influence of the media’s representation (focused on the professional field vs. extraprofessional field) and the athlete’s gender (man vs. woman) on perceptions, and in Study 2 (N = 625), we examined the effect of gender for an athlete receiving media coverage focused on the extraprofessional field. Study 1’s results showed that when media representation was based on the professional (vs. extraprofessional) field, participants perceived the news as more credible, believed that the media valued the athlete’s capacity to a greater extent, and attributed more merit to the athlete. Moreover, Study 2, focused on an extraprofessional field, indicated that when a man athlete (vs. woman athlete) was portrayed, participants were more likely to consider the news content accurate, which, in turn, was associated with a higher attribution of competence to the athlete and a higher intention to consume sports media in the future. The study will hopefully help reduce beliefs about existing stereotypes as well as discrimination against women, whether in sports or in any other field (e.g., professionally or in education).

By the end of the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), olfactory culture in China had evolved significantly as coveted aromatics continued to be imported and in increasing quantities from Southeast Asia. Although there is no surviving treatise dedicated to aromatics from this period, anecdotes in prose literature describing the uses and curation of scents reveal a process in which imported aromatics were being actively incorporated into existing olfactory culture and accrued new social, aesthetic, and ritual significance. This process is discernible in two major respects. First, a discourse of connoisseurship for aromatics arose in contrast to the conspicuous consumption of imported aromatics that flaunted wealth and status. Secondly, aromatics that were once the privilege of the very few began to be circulated among a wider (admittedly still elite) population, as seen in the case of the dragon brain aromatic in late-Tang and Five Dynasties accounts. By delving into these and related prose narratives and by cross-examining these accounts against other types of records, this article examines how imported aromatic goods shaped the Tang elite's perception of how scent was—and could be—used as part of a socially rooted sensory experience.

Social cognition (SC) comprises an array of cognitive and affective abilities such as social perception, theory of mind, empathy, and social behavior. Previous studies have suggested the existence of deficits in several SC abilities in Parkinson disease (PD), although not unanimously.

Objectives: People with Huntington’s disease (HD) experience poor social quality of life, relationship breakdown, and social withdrawal, which are mediated to some extent by socially debilitating neuropsychiatric symptoms, such as apathy and disinhibition. Social cognitive symptoms, such as impaired emotion recognition, also occur in HD, however, the extent of their association with these socially debilitating neuropsychiatric symptoms is unknown. Our study examined the relationship between emotion recognition and symptom ratings of apathy and disinhibition in HD. Methods: Thirty-two people with premanifest or symptomatic-HD completed Part 1 of The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT), which is a facial emotion recognition task. In addition, we obtained severity ratings for apathy and disinhibition on the Frontal Systems Behavior Scale (FrSBe) from a close family member. Our analyses used motor symptom severity as a proxy for disease progression. Results: Emotion recognition performance was significantly associated with family-ratings of apathy, above and beyond their shared association with disease severity. We found a similar pattern for disinhibition ratings, which fell short of statistical significance. As expected, worse emotion recognition performance was correlated with higher severity in FrSBe symptom ratings. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that emotion recognition abilities relate to key socially debilitating neuropsychiatric symptoms in HD. Our results help to understand the functional significance of emotion recognition impairments in HD, and may have implications for the development of remediation programs aimed at improving patients’ social quality of life. (JINS, 2018, 24, 417–423)

Objective: Social cognition has received growing interest in many conditions in recent years. However, this construct still suffers from a considerable lack of consensus, especially regarding the dimensions to be studied and the resulting methodology of clinical assessment. Our review aims to clarify the distinctiveness of the dimensions of social cognition. Method: Based on Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statements, a systematic review was conducted to explore the factor structure of social cognition in the adult general and clinical populations. Results: The initial search provided 441 articles published between January 1982 and March 2017. Eleven studies were included, all conducted in psychiatric populations and/or healthy participants. Most studies were in favor of a two-factor solution. Four studies drew a distinction between low-level (e.g., facial emotion/prosody recognition) and high-level (e.g., theory of mind) information processing. Four others reported a distinction between affective (e.g., facial emotion/prosody recognition) and cognitive (e.g., false beliefs) information processing. Interestingly, attributional style was frequently reported as an additional separate factor of social cognition. Conclusions: Results of factor analyses add further support for the relevance of models differentiating level of information processing (low- vs. high-level) from nature of processed information (affective vs. cognitive). These results add to a significant body of empirical evidence from developmental, clinical research and neuroimaging studies. We argue the relevance of integrating low- versus high-level processing with affective and cognitive processing in a two-dimensional model of social cognition that would be useful for future research and clinical practice. (JINS, 2018, 24, 391–404)

Objectives: Impairments of Theory of Mind (ToM) have been repeatedly demonstrated in patients with schizophrenia (SCZ). However, only a handful of studies have explored deficits in affective and cognitive subcomponents of ToM. Thus, this study aims to examine affective and cognitive ToM abilities in SCZ by using a novel, verbal paradigm. Methods: Twenty-four SCZ and 22 healthy comparison subjects (HC) completed a battery of tasks, which consisted of: (i) Brief Cognitive Assessment Tool for Schizophrenia (B-CATS), (ii) three well-established tasks measuring social cognitive abilities, and (iii) original tasks which assess ability to infer cognitive and affective mental states based on everyday verbal social interactions. Results: In line with previous findings, SCZ were outperformed by HC in all tasks. However, the interaction effect of the group and the task showed that cognitive (as opposed to affective) ToM was more profoundly impaired in patients with SCZ. Conclusions: It is proposed that in SCZ group cognitive ToM is more impaired as it involves more effortful reflective processes, while affective ToM, which is more automatic and based on reflexive processes, may differentiate patients from healthy comparison subjects to a lesser extent. (JINS, 2018, 24, 305–309)

This study investigates people's implicit stereotype of the social group of the rich in terms of competence and warmth. We further examine the stereotype's relationship with temporal selves. Implicit Association Tests were used as measures of implicit social perception in a social comparison context. We also rated the degree of psychological connectedness between current and possible future selves across time. Our results demonstrate that the rich are implicitly perceived as having high levels of competence and low levels of warmth compared to the average person, and that a close psychological connectedness mitigates the negative perception of the rich. The implications and limitations of these findings are also discussed.

Recognition of facial affect has been studied extensively in adults with and without traumatic brain injury (TBI), mostly by asking examinees to match basic emotion words to isolated faces. This method may not capture affect labelling in everyday life when faces are in context and choices are open-ended. To examine effects of context and response format, we asked 148 undergraduate students to label emotions shown on faces either in isolation or in natural visual scenes. Responses were categorised as representing basic emotions, social emotions, cognitive state terms, or appraisals. We used students’ responses to create a scoring system that was applied prospectively to five men with TBI. In both groups, over 50% of responses were neither basic emotion words nor synonyms, and there was no significant difference in response types between faces alone vs. in scenes. Adults with TBI used labels not seen in students’ responses, talked more overall, and often gave multiple labels for one photo. Results suggest benefits of moving beyond forced-choice tests of faces in isolation to fully characterise affect recognition in adults with and without TBI.

Social cognitive deficits are common in neuropsychiatric disorders. Given the proximity of social cognition (SC) to everyday functioning, many intervention studies (including targeted, comprehensive, and broad-based approaches) have focussed on SC. The aim of this paper was to quantitatively meta-analyse the efficacy of SC interventions in adult neuropsychiatric patients. Databases Pubmed, PsycINFO, Web of Knowledge, and Embase were searched for controlled SC intervention studies published between 01-01-2003 and 01-01-2016. Forty-one studies, comprising 1,508 patients with schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, or acquired brain injury were included. Outcome measures evaluated emotion perception (EP), social perception (SP), Theory of Mind (ToM), and social functioning (SF). The meta-analyses showed that interventions were effective in improving SC (Cohen's d=.71). Interventions targeting one specific SC function were found to be most effective (d=.89), followed by broad-based interventions, targeting non-SC domains in addition to SC (d=.65), and comprehensive interventions, that target multiple SC processes (d=.61). Targeted interventions were especially effective in improving EP and ToM. Comprehensive interventions were able to ameliorate EP, ToM, and SF. Broad-based interventions were especially effective in improving SF, but also showed effects on EP and ToM.

A high capacity for visual perception distinguishes Homo sapiens from other primates. This human ability to detect social cues and retain visual records of social networks has been tested mostly with static facial images in laboratory settings. However, media consumption has become closely entangled with the way social life is navigated. Therefore, the study reported here tested demographic differences (gender and education) in visual information processing of social and nonsocial objects featured in audiovisual news content. Women recognized (accuracy) and recalled (salience) social images better than men. On the other hand, men were more skilled at recognizing, but not recalling, nonsocial images. Participants with lower educational levels recognized and recalled fewer images than individuals with higher educational levels. Interactions between demographic variables and time suggest that memory records for social images are more stable than those for nonsocial images. Memory may have survival-relevant importance, serving navigational functions that vary across environmental demands, resulting in differences across demographic groups.