Mindful Parenting as a Mediator in Parents' Perspective-Taking: Exploring the Roles of Causal Attribution and Self-Compassion

Background

Existing literature has examined the link between parent causal attribution and self-compassion in parent perspective-taking, but the impact of mindful parenting as a mediator remains underexplored.

Purpose

The present study examines the mediating effect of mindful parenting on the relationship between parental attribution and self-compassion in parents' perspective-taking.

Methods

Using a cross-sectional design, 208 parents aged 30 to 59 (M = 42, SD = 4.3) with first-born adolescents aged 12-18 participated in the study.

Results

The results revealed that mindful parenting fully mediated the relationship between parental causal attribution and perspective-taking while partially mediating the association between self-compassion and perspective-taking.

Conclusion

These findings emphasize the crucial role of mindful parenting in explaining the relationship between parent causal attribution, self-compassion, and parent perspective-taking. Further research is needed to explore these relationships in more diverse and representative samples.

All it takes is empathy: how virtual reality perspective-taking influences intergroup attitudes and stereotypes

Research in the past decade has demonstrated the potential of virtual reality perspective-taking (VRPT) to reduce bias against salient outgroups. In the perspective-taking literature, both affective and cognitive mechanisms have been theorized and identified as plausible pathways to prejudice reduction. Few studies have systematically compared affective and cognitive mediators, especially in relation to virtual reality, a medium posited to produce visceral, affective experiences. The present study seeks to extend current research on VRPT's mechanisms by comparing empathy (affective) and situational attributions (cognitive) as dual mediators influencing intergroup attitudes (affective) and stereotypes (cognitive). In a between-subjects experiment, 84 participants were randomly assigned to embody a VR ingroup or outgroup waiting staff at a local food establishment, interacting with an impolite ingroup customer. Results indicated that participants in the outgroup VRPT condition reported significantly more positive attitudes and stereotypes towards outgroup members than those in the ingroup VRPT condition. For both attitudes and stereotypes, empathy significantly mediated the effect of VRPT, but situational attributions did not. Findings from this research provide support for affect as a key component of virtual experiences and how they shape intergroup perceptions. Implications and directions for further research are discussed.

A modified procedure for naming 332 pictures and collecting norms: Using tangram pictures in psycholinguistic studies

Tangram pictures are abstract pictures which may be used as stimuli in various fields of experimental psychology and are often used in the field of dialogue psychology. The present study provides the first norms for a set of 332 tangram pictures. These pictures were standardized on a set of variables classically used in the literature on cognitive processes, such as visual perception, language, and memory: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Furthermore, norms for concreteness were also provided owing to the influence of this variable on the processes involved in lexical production. Correlational analyses on all variables were performed on the data collected from French native speakers. This new set of standardized pictures constitutes a reliable database for researchers when they select tangram pictures. Given the abstract nature of tangram pictures, this paper also discusses the similarities and differences with the literature on line drawings, and highlights their value for dialogue psychology studies, for psycholinguistics studies, and for cognitive psychology in general.

[Application of artificial intelligence systems in the emergency room : Do the communication patterns give indications for possible starting points? An observational study]

BACKGROUND

High expectations are currently attached to the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the resuscitation room treatment of trauma patients with respect to the development of decision support systems. No data are available regarding possible starting points for AI-controlled interventions in resuscitation room treatment.

OBJECTIVE

Do information request behavior and quality of communication indicate possible starting points for AI applications in the emergency room?

MATERIAL AND METHODS

A 2‑stage qualitative observational study: 1. Development of an observation sheet based on expert interviews that depicts the following six relevant topics: situational factors (course of accident, environment), vital parameters, treatment-specific Information (treatment carried out). trauma-specific factors (injury patterns), medication, special features of the patient (anamnesis, etc.) 2. Observational study Which topics were inquired about during emergency room treatment? Was the exchange of information complete?

RESULTS

There were 40 consecutive observations in the emergency room. A total of 130 questions: 57/130 inquiries about medication/treatment-specific Information and vital parameters, 19/28 of which were inquiries about medication. Questions about injury-related parameters 31/130 with 18/31 regarding injury patterns, course of accident (8/31) and type of accident (5/31). Questions about medical or demographic background 42/130. Within this group, pre-existing illnesses (14/42) and demographic background (10/42) were the most frequently asked questions. Incomplete exchange of information was found in all six subject areas.

CONCLUSION

Questioning behavior and incomplete communication indicate a cognitive overload. Assistance systems that prevent cognitive overload can maintain decision-making abilities and communication skills. Which AI methods can be used requires further research.

When non-salient information becomes salient in conversational memory: Collaboration shapes the effects of emotion and self-production

People's memory of what was said and who said what during dialogue plays a central role in mutual comprehension and subsequent adaptation. This article outlines that well-established effects in conversational memory such as the self-production and the emotional effects actually depend on the nature of the interaction. We specifically focus on the impact of the collaborative nature of the interaction, comparing participants' conversational memory in non-collaborative and collaborative interactive settings involving interactions between two people (i.e., dialogue). The findings reveal that the amplitude of these conversational memory effects depends on the collaborative vs. non-collaborative nature of the interaction. The effects are attenuated when people have the opportunity to collaborate because information that remained non-salient in the non-collaborative condition (neutral and partner-produced words) became salient in the collaborative condition to a level similar to otherwise salient information (emotional and self-produced words). We highlight the importance of these findings in the study of dialogue and conversational memory.

EXPRESS: Comparing individual and collective management of referential choices in dialogue

Past research shows that when a discourse referent is mentioned repeatedly, it is usually introduced with a full NP and maintained with a reduced form such as a pronoun. Is this also the case in dialogue, where the same referent may be introduced by one person and maintained by another person? An experiment was conducted in which participants either told entire stories to each other or told stories together, thus enabling us to contrast situations in which characters were introduced and maintained by the same person (control condition) and situations in which the introduction and the maintaining of each character were performed by different people (alternating condition). Story complexity was also manipulated through the introduction of one or two characters in each story. We found that participants were less likely to use reduced forms to maintain referents in the alternating condition. The use of reduced forms also depended on the context in which the referent was maintained (in particular, first or second mention of a character) and on story complexity. These results shed light on how the pressure to signal understanding to one's conversational partner affects referential choices throughout the interaction.

Limits to the Rational Production of Discourse Connectives

Rational accounts of language use such as the uniform information density hypothesis, which asserts that speakers distribute information uniformly across their utterances, and the rational speech act (RSA) model, which suggests that speakers optimize the formulation of their message by reasoning about what the comprehender would understand, have been hypothesized to account for a wide range of language use phenomena. We here specifically focus on the production of discourse connectives. While there is some prior work indicating that discourse connective production may be governed by RSA, that work uses a strongly gamified experimental setting. In this study, we aim to explore whether speakers reason about the interpretation of their conversational partner also in more realistic settings. We thereby systematically vary the task setup to tease apart effects of task instructions and effects of the speaker explicitly seeing the interpretation alternatives for the listener. Our results show that the RSA-predicted effect of connective choice based on reasoning about the listener is only found in the original setting where explicit interpretation alternatives of the listener are available for the speaker. The effect disappears when the speaker has to reason about listener interpretations. We furthermore find that rational effects are amplified by the gamified task setting, indicating that meta-reasoning about the specific task may play an important role and potentially limit the generalizability of the found effects to more naturalistic every-day language use.

The Division of Labor in Communication: Speakers Help Listeners Account for Asymmetries in Visual Perspective

Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking may be relatively effortful. Yet adults routinely engage in effortful processes when needed. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate their resources to achieve successful communication? We begin with the observation that the shared goal of communication induces a natural division of labor: The resources one agent chooses to allocate toward perspective-taking should depend on their expectations about the other's allocation. We formalize this idea in a resource-rational model augmenting recent probabilistic weighting accounts with a mechanism for (costly) control over the degree of perspective-taking. In a series of simulations, we first derive an intermediate degree of perspective weighting as an optimal trade-off between expected costs and benefits of perspective-taking. We then present two behavioral experiments testing novel predictions of our model. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the presence or absence of occlusions in a director-matcher task. We found that speakers spontaneously modulated the informativeness of their descriptions to account for "known unknowns" in their partner's private view, reflecting a higher degree of speaker perspective-taking than previously acknowledged. In Experiment 2, we then compared the scripted utterances used by confederates in prior work with those produced in interactions with unscripted directors. We found that confederates were systematically less informative than listeners would initially expect given the presence of occlusions, but listeners used violations to adaptively make fewer errors over time. Taken together, our work suggests that people are not simply "mindblind"; they use contextually appropriate expectations to navigate the division of labor with their partner. We discuss how a resource-rational framework may provide a more deeply explanatory foundation for understanding flexible perspective-taking under processing constraints.

Do People Regard Robots as Human-Like Social Partners? Evidence From Perspective-Taking in Spatial Descriptions

Spatial communications are essential to the survival and social interaction of human beings. In science fiction and the near future, robots are supposed to be able to understand spatial languages to collaborate and cooperate with humans. However, it remains unknown whether human speakers regard robots as human-like social partners. In this study, human speakers describe target locations to an imaginary human or robot addressee under various scenarios varying in relative speaker–addressee cognitive burden. Speakers made equivalent perspective choices to human and robot addressees, which consistently shifted according to the relative speaker–addressee cognitive burden. However, speakers’ perspective choice was only significantly correlated to their social skills when the addressees were humans but not robots. These results suggested that people generally assume robots and humans with equal capabilities in understanding spatial descriptions but do not regard robots as human-like social partners.

Behavioral Counseling Training for Primary Care Providers: Immersive Virtual Simulation as a Training Tool

Behavioral counseling represents an efficacious approach for improving health behaviors on a population level, and the primary care setting is an appropriate context in which to implement this approach. However, evidence suggests that the utilization of behavioral counseling techniques in primary care, including those informed by motivational interviewing, is sub-optimal. Insufficient training has been cited as a barrier to utilizing counseling in the primary care setting. Recent work has evaluated the effectiveness of virtual simulations that can provide access to "virtual" patients while retaining the scalability inherent to a digital medium. However, these educational interventions have been limited to simulations delivered through a two-dimensional screen. More immersive simulations delivered through a head-mounted display can create a realistic practice environment that encompasses a learner's entire field of view, which may confer additional benefits with respect to training outcomes. The purpose of this short article is to briefly review the relevant literature across disciplines to conceptualize the potential effectiveness of this technology as a training tool for behavioral counseling. Immersive virtual simulations are designed to induce a psychological phenomenon referred to as presence, whereby a learner perceives themselves as existing within the virtual environment. As such, immersive virtual simulations can provide opportunities for practice, coaching, and feedback in an environment that closely approximates the clinical setting in which counseling will be delivered. Through its effects on presence, this technology may be particularly useful for developing empathy, which is an important component of counseling. Recommendations for future research are also provided.

When Ignorance Is Bliss: Exploring Perspective Taking, Negative State Affect and Performance

Whereas the positive relationship between positive affect in teams and team performance is well established, the relationship between team negative affect and team performance seems to be subject to moderating effects. We focus on the effects of perspective taking as one of these moderators, and posit that perspective taking impedes team performance when team state affect is negative because team members become preoccupied with others’ negative emotions. Results from 49 teams involved in a computerized interactive decision-making task support our hypothesis: Negative state affect was negatively related to performance for teams high in perspective taking, but not for teams low in perspective taking. This leads to the conclusion that when teams experience high negative affect, they benefit from low perspective taking.

Cognitive and behavioural predictors of adolescents' communicative perspective-taking and social relationships

Given the pivotal role that social interactions play for adolescents' well-being, understanding the factors that influence communication is key. The present study examined relations between adolescents' communicative perspective-taking, executive function skills, and ADHD traits and explored the role communicative perspective-taking plays in peer relations. Data was collected from a community sample of 15 to 19-years-olds (N = 46) in Waterloo, Canada. Two communicative perspective-taking tasks required participants to infer speakers' communicative intentions. A battery of tasks assessed adolescents' working memory and inhibitory control. Elevated ADHD traits were associated with weaker working memory, inhibitory control, and communicative perspective-taking. Working memory was the strongest predictor of communicative perspective-taking. Highlighting the importance of communicative perspective-taking for social interactions, adolescents with weaker skills in this area reported worse peer relations. Findings underscore the importance of communicative perspective-taking for adolescents' social relations and have relevance for understanding the social difficulties faced by adolescents with elevated ADHD traits.

The art of common ground: emergence of a complex pragmatic language skill in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

Deficits in pragmatic language are central to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we investigate common ground, a pragmatic language skill in which speakers adjust the contents of their speech based on their interlocutor's perceived knowledge, in adolescents with ASD and typical development (TD), using an experimental narrative paradigm. Consistent with prior research, TD participants produced shorter narrations when they shared knowledge with an interlocutor, an effect not observed at the group level in ASD. This effect was unrelated to general skills such as IQ or receptive vocabulary. In ASD, the effect was correlated with age and symptom severity: older and less severely affected participants did shorten their narratives. Several metrics (including explicit references to common ground, speech disfluencies, and communicative quality ratings) suggested that, although adolescents with ASD did not show implicit reductions in their narrative length, they were aware of common ground, and communicated differently in its presence.

Conversational Interaction in the Scanner: Mentalizing during Language Processing as Revealed by MEG

Humans are especially good at taking another's perspective-representing what others might be thinking or experiencing. This "mentalizing" capacity is apparent in everyday human interactions and conversations. We investigated its neural basis using magnetoencephalography. We focused on whether mentalizing was engaged spontaneously and routinely to understand an utterance's meaning or largely on-demand, to restore "common ground" when expectations were violated. Participants conversed with 1 of 2 confederate speakers and established tacit agreements about objects' names. In a subsequent "test" phase, some of these agreements were violated by either the same or a different speaker. Our analysis of the neural processing of test phase utterances revealed recruitment of neural circuits associated with language (temporal cortex), episodic memory (e.g., medial temporal lobe), and mentalizing (temporo-parietal junction and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Theta oscillations (3-7 Hz) were modulated most prominently, and we observed phase coupling between functionally distinct neural circuits. The episodic memory and language circuits were recruited in anticipation of upcoming referring expressions, suggesting that context-sensitive predictions were spontaneously generated. In contrast, the mentalizing areas were recruited on-demand, as a means for detecting and resolving perceived pragmatic anomalies, with little evidence they were activated to make partner-specific predictions about upcoming linguistic utterances.

Communicative perspective-taking performance of adults with ADHD symptoms

OBJECTIVE

The ability to take the perspective of one's conversational partner is essential for successful communication. Given the significant cognitive and attention resources required to use another's perspective, the authors assessed whether adults who report symptoms of ADHD would have difficulty using their conversational partner's visual perspective to guide their interpretations.

METHOD

Adults with high (clinical range) or low (nonclinical range) self-reported ADHD symptoms participated in a communication task that required perspective-taking.

RESULTS

Eye movement measures revealed that individuals with high ADHD symptoms fixated on objects obscured from their partners' view more often than did those participants with low ADHD symptoms, and the degree to which this "egocentric" object was considered correlated with the degree of inattention symptoms. However, overt behavior (object choice) was not impacted by ADHD symptomatology.

CONCLUSION

Individuals with high levels of ADHD symptoms, especially inattention, are less efficient in their ability to use another's perspective during conversation.

An Exploratory Investigation of the Process of Perspective Taking in Interpersonal Situations

The ability to take the perspectives of others is considered a prerequisite for effective interpersonal interaction. Despite extensive investigation into the correlates of perspective taking, there have been few previous attempts to understand the process by which people take another's psychological point of view. The purpose of this exploratory study was to identify the strategies used by individuals when attempting to take the perspective of another person. Twelve participants discussed a time they engaged in perspective taking. The analysis revealed that perspective taking was used in situations in which significant negative emotions could arise, and that participants shifted between the use of self-information (e.g., switching places, past experience) and other-information (e.g., target's personal characteristics) during the process of perspective taking. Different emotions and cognitions were associated with taking one's own perspective and taking that of the other person. The study provides a direct consideration of an under-investigated component of social and personal relationships.

The effect of information overlap on communication effectiveness

It makes sense that the more information people share, the better they communicate. To evaluate the effect of knowledge overlap on the effectiveness of communication, participants played a communication game where the "director" identified objects to the "addressee". Pairs either shared information about most objects' names (high overlap), or about the minority of objects' names (low overlap). We found that high-overlap directors tended to use more names than low overlap directors. High overlap directors also used more names with objects whose names only they knew, thereby confusing their addressees more often than low-overlap directors. We conclude that while sharing more knowledge can be beneficial to communication overall, it can cause communication to be locally ineffective. Sharing more information reduces communication effectiveness precisely when there is an opportunity to inform-when people communicate information only they themselves know.

[Is ironic meaning activated before considering common ground?]

This study used an on-line method to explore whether the perception of irony occurs before considering common ground between speaker and listener. In Experiment 1 and 2, the shared common ground between the speaker and the listener was manipulated, and a meaningfulness-decision task was conducted immediately after the presentation of ironical utterances. The results showed that a priming effect was obtained only when common ground was shared by the speaker and the listener when utterances were presented with long duration (1800 ms). When utterances were presented with a short duration (1000 ms), however, priming effects were obtained regardless of the common ground. In Experiment 3, no priming effect was obtained when the contexts were presented without the utterances. The results suggest that ironic meaning is activated from an egocentric perspective at an early stage of processing and is inhibited at a later stage if it is not intended.

Lost in thought: cognitive load and the processing of addressees' feedback in verbal communication

Two experiments tested if cognitive load interferes with perspective-taking in verbal communication even if feedback from the addressee is available. Participants gave instructions on the assembly of a machine model. In Experiment 1, cognitive load was demonstrated to be a function of the complexity of assembly steps. In Experiment 2, position of feedback (during simple vs. during complex steps) and type of feedback (question vs. ambiguous interjection) were manipulated. With simple steps, speakers' responses were a function of feedback type. Speakers responded differently to questions than to interjections. With complex steps, however, responses were a function of cognitive load. Regardless of the type of feedback, most speakers simply repeated their previous utterances.