A collective perspective: shared attention and the mind

Preschoolers' in-group bias promotes altruistic sharing and reduces second-party punishment: The role of theory of mind

This study examines how in-group bias affects altruistic sharing and second-party punishment in preschoolers and the role of theory of mind (ToM) in in-group bias. Preschoolers aged 4 to 7 years (N = 309; 160 girls) were asked to share resources with an in-group member and an out-group member (Dictator Game) and to reject or accept an unequal allocation proposed by an in-group member and an out-group member (Ultimatum Game). The results showed that preschoolers shared more resources with, and tolerated more unfair behaviors from, in-group members. ToM influenced the in-group bias in both altruistic sharing and second-party punishment. Notably, children's degree of in-group favoritism in altruistic sharing was positively related to the second-party punishment children imposed on out-group members. However, this pattern was found only among children who had acquired first-order ToM. This study reveals the developmental patterns of preschoolers' in-group bias in altruistic sharing and second-party punishment and the effects of ToM on in-group bias.

Why We Gather: A New Look, Empirically Documented, at Émile Durkheim's Theory of Collective Assemblies and Collective Effervescence

For Durkheim, individuals' survival and well-being rest on cultural resources and social belonging that must be revived periodically in collective assemblies. Durkheim's concern was to clarify how these assemblies achieve this revitalization. An intensive examination of primitive religions led him to identify successive levels of engagement experienced by participants and to develop explanatory principles relevant to all types of collective gatherings. Durkheim's conception is widely referred to nowadays. However, the question of its empirical status remains open. We extracted from his text his main statements and translated them into research questions. We then examined each question in relation to current theories and findings. In particular, we relied on the plethora of recent cognitive and social-psychology studies that document conditions of reduced self-other differentiation. Abundant data support that each successive moment of collective assemblies contributes to blurring this differentiation. Ample support also exists that because shared emotions are increasingly amplified in collective context, they can fuel high-intensity experiences. Moreover, recent studies of self-transcendent emotions can account for the self-transformative effects described by Durkheim at the climax of collective assemblies. In conclusion, this century-old model is remarkably supported by recent results, mostly collected in experimental settings.

Dialogic Book-Sharing as a Privileged Intersubjective Space

Parental reading to young children is well-established as being positively associated with child cognitive development, particularly their language development. Research indicates that a particular, "intersubjective," form of using books with children, "Dialogic Book-sharing" (DBS), is especially beneficial to infants and pre-school aged children, particularly when using picture books. The work on DBS to date has paid little attention to the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of the approach. Here, we address the question of what processes taking place during DBS confer benefits to child development, and why these processes are beneficial. In a novel integration of evidence, ranging from non-human primate communication through iconic gestures and pointing, archaeological data on Pre-hominid and early human art, to experimental and naturalistic studies of infant attention, cognitive processing, and language, we argue that DBS entails core characteristics that make it a privileged intersubjective space for the promotion of child cognitive and language development. This analysis, together with the findings of DBS intervention studies, provides a powerful intellectual basis for the wide-scale promotion of DBS, especially in disadvantaged populations.

The Power of Listening at Work

Listening is associated with and a likely cause of desired organizational outcomes in numerous areas, including job performance, leadership, quality of relationships (e.g., trust), job knowledge, job attitudes, and well-being. To advance understanding of the powerful effects of listening on organizational outcomes, we review the construct of listening, its measurement and experimental manipulations, and its outcomes, antecedents, and moderators. We suggest that listening is a dyadic phenomenon that benefits both the listener and the speaker, including supervisor-subordinate and salesperson-customer dyads. To explain previous findings and generate novel and testable hypotheses, we propose the episodic listening theory: listening can lead to a fleeting state of togetherness, in which dyad members undergo a mutual creative thought process. This process yields clarity, facilitates the generation of novel plans, increases well-being, and strengthens attachment to the conversation partner.

A Two-Person Neuroscience Approach for Social Anxiety: A Paradigm With Interbrain Synchrony and Neurofeedback

Social anxiety disorder has been widely recognised as one of the most commonly diagnosed mental disorders. Individuals with social anxiety disorder experience difficulties during social interactions that are essential in the regular functioning of daily routines; perpetually motivating research into the aetiology, maintenance and treatment methods. Traditionally, social and clinical neuroscience studies incorporated protocols testing one participant at a time. However, it has been recently suggested that such protocols are unable to directly assess social interaction performance, which can be revealed by testing multiple individuals simultaneously. The principle of two-person neuroscience highlights the interpersonal aspect of social interactions that observes behaviour and brain activity from both (or all) constituents of the interaction, rather than analysing on an individual level or an individual observation of a social situation. Therefore, two-person neuroscience could be a promising direction for assessment and intervention of the social anxiety disorder. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm which integrates two-person neuroscience in a neurofeedback protocol. Neurofeedback and interbrain synchrony, a branch of two-person neuroscience, are discussed in their own capacities for their relationship with social anxiety disorder and relevance to the paradigm. The newly proposed paradigm sets out to assess the social interaction performance using interbrain synchrony between interacting individuals, and to employ a multi-user neurofeedback protocol for intervention of the social anxiety.

Agency and Identity in the Collective Self

Contemporary research on human sociality is heavily influenced by the social identity approach, positioning social categorization as the primary mechanism governing social life. Building on the distinction between agency and identity in the individual self ("I" vs. "Me"), we emphasize the analogous importance of distinguishing collective agency from collective identity ("We" vs. "Us"). While collective identity is anchored in the unique characteristics of group members, collective agency involves the adoption of a shared subjectivity that is directed toward some object of our attention, desire, emotion, belief, or action. These distinct components of the collective self are differentiated in terms of their mental representations, neurocognitive underpinnings, conditions of emergence, mechanisms of social convergence, and functional consequences. Overall, we show that collective agency provides a useful complement to the social categorization approach, with unique implications for multiple domains of human social life, including collective action, responsibility, dignity, violence, dominance, ritual, and morality.

The impact of joint attention on the sound-induced flash illusions

Humans coordinate their focus of attention with others, either by gaze following or prior agreement. Though the effects of joint attention on perceptual and cognitive processing tend to be examined in purely visual environments, they should also show in multisensory settings. According to a prevalent hypothesis, joint attention enhances visual information encoding and processing, over and above individual attention. If two individuals jointly attend to the visual components of an audiovisual event, this should affect the weighing of visual information during multisensory integration. We tested this prediction in this preregistered study, using the well-documented sound-induced flash illusions, where the integration of an incongruent number of visual flashes and auditory beeps results in a single flash being seen as two (fission illusion) and two flashes as one (fusion illusion). Participants were asked to count flashes either alone or together, and expected to be less prone to both fission and fusion illusions when they jointly attended to the visual targets. However, illusions were as frequent when people attended to the flashes alone or with someone else, even though they responded faster during joint attention. Our results reveal the limitations of the theory that joint attention enhances visual processing as it does not affect temporal audiovisual integration.

Groups as organisms: Implications for therapy and training

The intellectual tradition of individualism treats the individual person as the fundamental unit of analysis and reduces all things social to the motives and actions of individuals. Most methods in clinical psychology are influenced by individualism and therefore treat the individual as the primary object of therapy/training, even when recognizing the importance of nurturing social relationships for individual wellbeing. Multilevel selection theory offers an alternative to individualism in which individuals become part of something larger than themselves that qualifies as an organism in its own right. Seeing individuals as parts of social organisms provides a new perspective with numerous implications for improving wellbeing at all scales, from individuals to the planet.

Prior attentional bias is modulated by social gaze

Focusing attention is a key cognitive skill, but how the gaze of others affects engaged attention remains relatively unknown. We investigated if participants' attentional bias toward a location is modulated by the number of people gazing toward or away from it. We presented participants with a nonpredictive directional cue that biased attention towards a specific location. Then, any number of four stimulus faces turned their gaze toward or away from the attended location. When all the faces looked at the attended location participants increased their commitment to it, and response time to targets at that location were speeded. When most or all of the faces looked away from the attended location, attention was withdrawn, and response times were slowed. This study reveals that the gaze of others can penetrate one's ability to focus attention, which in turn can be both beneficial and costly to one's responses to events in the environment.

Attention in naïve psychology

In everyday life, mentalizing is nested in a rich context of cognitive faculties and background information that potentially contribute to its success. Yet, we know little about these modulating effects. Here we propose that humans develop a naïve psychological model of attention (featured as a goal-dependent, intentional relation to the environment) and use this to fine-tune their mentalizing attempts, presuming that the way people represent their environment is influenced by the cognitive priorities (attention) their current intentions create. The attention model provides an opportunity to tailor mental state inferences to the temporary features of the agent whose mind is in the focus of mentalizing. The ability to trace attention is an exceptionally powerful aid for mindreading. Knowledge about the partner's attention provides background information, however being grounded in his current intentions, attention has direct relevance to the ongoing interaction. Furthermore, due to its causal connection to intentions, the output of the attention model remains valid for a prolonged but predictable amount of time: till the evoking intention is in place. The naïve attention model theory is offered as a novel theory on social attention that both incorporates existing evidence and identifies new directions in research.

Conflicting obligations in human social life

Tomasello describes how the sense of moral obligation emerges from a shared perspective with collaborative partners and in-group members. Our commentary expands this framework to accommodate multiple social identities, where the normative standards associated with diverse group memberships can often conflict with one another. Reconciling these conflicting obligations is argued to be a central part of human morality.

Effects of a partner's task on memory for content and source

Human memories are malleable and often shaped by social interactions. Previous work has demonstrated that not only one's own goals, but also those of a task-partner can facilitate subsequent retrieval of goal-relevant lexical stimuli, known as the Joint Memory Effect (JME). We outline a social-epistemic account of the JME which proposes that this memory enhancement reflects humans' tendency to map out their interaction partners' knowledge states, leading them to cognitively prioritize information relevant to and selectively attended by their partner. This account predicts that the memory enhancement for partner-relevant words should be limited to contexts where task partners are required to process their targets in terms of meaning, instead of attending to a surface feature. Additionally, we predicted that facilitated recall performance for partner-relevant information would be accompanied by enhanced memory for the social context of that information, that is, participants should be able to link the remembered content to the agent acting on it. The results of four experiments support these predictions. We demonstrate that the JME emerges selectively, depending on which stimulus feature (word meaning or presentation color) is attended by the partner, and that it extends to (and may even depend on) memory for the social context of the targets. Prioritizing partner-relevant information in memory may be linked to processes involved in establishing and monitoring common ground.

What Drives Our Emotions When We Watch Sporting Events? An ESM Study on the Affective Experience of German Spectators During the 2018 FIFA World Cup

There is ample evidence that watching sports induces strong emotions that translate into manifold consequential behaviours. However, it is rather ill-understood how exactly spectators’ emotions unfold during soccer matches and what determines their intensity. To address these questions, we used the 2018 FIFA World Cup as a natural quasi-experiment to conduct a pre-registered study on spectators’ emotional experiences. Employing an app-based experience-sampling design, we tracked 251 German spectators during the tournament and assessed high-resolution changes in core affect (valence, activation) throughout soccer matches. Across the three German matches, multi-level models revealed that all spectators exhibited strong changes on both affective dimensions in response to Germany’s performance. Although fans experienced slightly more intense affect than non-fans, particularly during losses, this moderating effect was very small in comparison to the magnitude of the affective fluctuations that occurred independent of fan identity. Taken together, the findings suggest group emotions (collectively felt emotion irrespective of individual affiliation) rather than group-affiliation based emotions (individually felt emotion because of an affiliated group), as the dominant process underlying spectator affect during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Watching a video together creates social closeness between children and adults

Human social relationships are often formed through shared social activities in which individuals share mental states about external stimuli. Previous work on joint attention has shown that even minimal shared experiences such as watching something together facilitates social closeness between individuals. Here, we examined whether young children already connect with others through joint attention. In the current studies, children sat next to a novel adult who either watched a film with them or was not able to see the film and read a book instead. After the video, we measured children's willingness (i.e., latency) to approach the experimenter holding out a toy. In both studies, the 2.5-year-olds who watched the film together approached more quickly than the other children. These results show that both minimally interactive shared experiences and noninteractive shared experiences lead children to feel more comfortable with a novel adult. This suggests that joint attention interactions, and shared experiences in general, play an important role not only in children's cognitive development but also in their social development and the formation of their social relationships.

Groups and Emotional Arousal Mediate Neural Synchrony and Perceived Ritual Efficacy

We present the first neurophysiological signatures showing distinctive effects of group social context and emotional arousal on cultural perceptions, such as the efficacy of religious rituals. Using a novel protocol, EEG data were simultaneously recorded from ethnic Chinese religious believers in group and individual settings as they rated the perceived efficacy of low, medium, and high arousal spirit-medium rituals presented as video clips. Neural oscillatory patterns were then analyzed for these perceptual judgements, categorized as low, medium, and high efficacy. The results revealed distinct neural signatures and behavioral patterns between the experimental conditions. Arousal levels predicted ratings of ritual efficacy. Increased efficacy was marked by suppressed alpha and beta power, regardless of group or individual setting. In groups, efficacy ratings converged. Individual setting showed increased within-participant phase synchronization in alpha and beta bands, while group setting enhanced between-participant theta phase synchronization. This reflected group participants' orientation toward a common perspective and social coordination. These findings suggest that co-presence in groups leads to a social-tuning effect supported by between-participant theta phase synchrony. Together these neural synchrony patterns reveal how collective rituals have both individual and communal dimensions. The emotionality of spirit-medium rituals drives individual perceptions of efficacy, while co-presence in groups signals the significance of an event and socially tunes enhanced agreement in perceptual ratings. In other words, mass gatherings may foster social cohesion without necessarily requiring group-size scaling limitations of direct face-to-face interaction. This could have implications for the scaling computability of synchrony in large groups as well as for humanistic studies in areas such as symbolic interactionism.

Interactive Brain Activity: Review and Progress on EEG-Based Hyperscanning in Social Interactions

When individuals interact with others, perceived information is transmitted among their brains. The EEG-based hyperscanning technique, which provides an approach to explore dynamic brain activities between two or more interactive individuals and their underlying neural mechanisms, has been applied to study different aspects of social interactions since 2010. Recently there has been an increase in research on EEG-based hyperscanning of social interactions. This paper summarizes the application of EEG-based hyperscanning on the dynamic brain activities during social interactions according to the experimental designs and contents, discusses the possibility of applying inter-brain synchrony to social communication systems and analyzes the contributions and the limitations of these investigations. Furthermore, this paper sheds light on some new challenges to future EEG-based hyperscanning studies and the emerging field of EEG-based hyperscanning for pursuing the broader research field of social interactions.