After reading this article discuss:Briefly summarize your source, the author’s credibility, and recommendations for improvement.Discuss what context you could apply the social cognition: understanding others and ourselves to. Be specific.Critique the recommendations and whether you find the recommendations useful. Explain why or why not. AbstractIn order to interpret and engage with the social world, individuals must understand how they relate to others. Self-otherunderstanding forms the backbone of social cognition and is a central concept explored by research into basic processes such asaction perception and empathy, as well as research on more sophisticated social behaviours such as cooperation and intergroupinteraction. This theme issue integrates the latest research into self-other understanding from evolutionary biology, anthropology,psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry. By gathering perspectives from a diverse range of disciplines, the contributions showcaseways in which research in these areas both informs and is informed by approaches spanning the biological and social sciences, thusdeepening our understanding of how we relate to others in a social world.IntroductionThe past 20 years have brought extraordinary progress to our understanding of social cognition. Evolutionary biologistshave uncovered sophisticated abilities in non-human primates, such as perspective taking [1,2] and social learning [3,4].Developmental psychologists and anthropologists have delineated both the universal origins and culturally variabletrajectories of pro-social abilities and morality [5-7]. At the same time, our understanding of the mechanisms underlyingsocial cognition has been both aided and challenged by the discovery of mirror neurons [8], a discovery which hassimultaneously confirmed the importance of self-related processing in understanding others [9-11], and raised furtherquestions about the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins of such mechanisms [12]. In the clinical domain, a growingappreciation of the heterogeneity present in socio-cognitive disorders (e.g. [13]) has led to an increased emphasis onunderstanding the mechanisms underlying deficits in specific socio-cognitive abilities, rather than considering clinicalgroups as presenting with homogeneous patterns of impairment [14-16].Despite the considerable advances each of these individual disciplines has contributed to our understanding of humansocial cognition, few opportunities exist for researchers across these fields to consider how their work informs and isinformed by related work in other disciplines. Core questions in human social cognition, such as how we use our ownexperience to understand the experience of others, and how we understand the ways in which we are connected toothers, tap into a key construct that transcends disciplinary boundaries: namely, the understanding of the relationshipbetween self and other. While the importance of characterizing the neurocognitive mechanisms and behaviouralconsequences of self-other understanding is clear, further progress in elucidating how self-other understandingcontributes to social interaction, and in improving self-other understanding in socio-cognitive disorders, will requireinterdisciplinary integration. To address this urgent need, this theme issue has been designed to facilitate theinterdisciplinary exchange that is required to advance both basic science and the clinical applications of social cognitionresearch.This theme issue brings together researchers from a rich array of disciplines to discuss the latest developments in self-other understanding. The issue is organized into two broad thematic strands. The first addresses the origins of socialcognition and the second addresses the processes supporting typical and atypical social cognition. The theme issuebegins with papers highlighting the latest comparative research on the phylogenetic origins of cooperation, andanthropological research into cultural influences on self-other relationships. Next, papers examining the developmentalorigins of social cognition articulate how self-other differentiation develops, and how young children demonstratesensitivity to self-other differentiation by dividing the world into social groups. The latter part of the issue focuses onmechanisms of social cognition. It includes empirical work exploring how training interventions aimed at improving self-other control processes can modulate empathy, and a study that investigates the underlying neural architectures thatsupport effective understanding of other agents, whether human or artificial. The theme issue concludes with a numberof contributions offering fresh insights and new theoretical proposals that address how the mechanisms underlying self-other understanding break down in disorders of social cognition, including autism, depression and schizophrenia.In order to facilitate interdisciplinary integration and exchange between the distinct disciplines and themes that arecovered in this issue, we have also asked researchers from three different backgrounds to compose commentary piecesthat not only review their own work on these topics but also relate it to the contributions from different disciplinaryperspectives, discussing how work in their own field informs, or is informed by, work in other areas. Our aim is that thesecommentary pieces will help to break down traditional disciplinary barriers and so prompt progress that is not possiblewhen each discipline operates in isolation.The contributors to this theme issue are seeking novel answers to the overarching questions which define the field,including: What are the evolutionary and cultural origins of our social cognitive abilities? How do innate predispositionsinteract with the environment across development? What are the cognitive mechanisms underlying self-otherunderstanding and are they uniquely social or domain general in nature? How can we harness our knowledge of socialcognition to understand atypical development and cognition? These questions are deeply interconnected andinherently interdisciplinary in nature. Building on these questions, the following sections highlight the maincontributions made by each paper to this theme issue. Origins: the evolution and development of social cognitionThe first area of investigation in this theme issue draws upon research placed at the interface between evolutionary biology,psychology and anthropology. Several papers address the origins of human social abilities, using a variety of complementaryapproaches to investigate how human biology interacts with cultural influences to produce variation in self-otherunderstanding between social groups. Schmelz & Call [17] begin with an evolutionary approach, critically reviewing theexperimental literature on how chimpanzees interact with each other through cooperation and competition. They highlight theneed to study social cognitive skills, as well as social motivation, within the context of both cooperation and competition.Heyes [18] focuses on the importance of learning and proposes that cultural practices may influence the development of socialabilities. Taking the specific example of imitation, she deconstructs the widely held belief among developmental andcomparative psychologists that the superior imitation abilities of humans are due to a special, evolved in-built' matchingmechanism [19] that endows us with the ability to match representations of self and other. She argues instead that the ability toimitate may be the result of cultural practices, and that the associative sequence learning (ASL) model of imitation provides analternative account supported by empirical evidence. To further support this claim, she systematically addresses sevenpossible criticisms of the ASL model.Keller [20] also emphasizes learning but takes a cross-cultural approach to the development of understanding self and other.She discusses two key dimensions of social relationships into which children may be socialized: autonomy and relatedness.Taking the examples of middle class German children and the children of Nso farmers in North Western Cameroon, shedescribes how parenting practices may lead children to have a more autonomous or more relational understanding of theirrelationship to others.The commentary by Nielsen & Haun [21] draws together the approaches mentioned here. It emphasizes the importance ofadopting a comparative and cross-cultural approach to understanding development in particular, and social cognition moregenerally. Nielsen & Haun review the literature on social learning, cooperation, prosociality and theory of mind usingdevelopmental, comparative and cross-cultural evidence. They highlight the importance of social motivation in explaininguniquely human forms of social cognitive abilities such as imitation and cooperation.The next group of papers complement this evolutionary perspective by focusing more specifically on the development of self-other understanding across a variety of different processes, from empathy to group membership. Steinbeis [22] describes theneurodevelopmental underpinnings of the ability to distinguish between representations of the self and of others during socialinteraction. He sets out a contrast between the process of self-other distinction in cognitive and affective domains that is alsodiscussed in later contributions [23,24]. Steinbeis' review describes how the ability to distinguish between self and otheremerges in early childhood, and the development of this ability into adulthood.Over's paper [25] picks up on the theme of motivation and explores the developmental origins of our need to belong. Bymarshalling evidence from developmental and social psychology, she crafts a compelling case for the importance of socialmotivation for understanding social behaviour. She concludes by arguing that, in order to understand better social cognitionand behaviour in individuals of all ages, it will be imperative to develop a new programme of experimental research thatsystematically examines the role played by social motivation across development.McAuliffe & Dunham [26] adopt an intergroup perspective on the relationship between self and other and discuss why childrenprefer members of their own group. They discuss evidence that both adults and children tend to share more resources withmembers of their own group and critically evaluate why this is. They conclude that, although the pattern of evidence is complex,the data are broadly consistent with an account based on general affective preferences.The commentary by Milward & Sebanz [27] addresses how mechanisms underpinning self-other distinctions develop. Theauthors examine how the other contributions in this section might help us to understand more deeply the role played byempathy during social interaction. They offer insights into how we accomplish actions cooperatively with others, andstage for uniting the relatively independent literatures concerning dyadic and group-based interactions.Processes: mechanisms and disorders of social cognitionThe second key theme of this issue relates to the processes underlying social cognition. The latter two sections of the special issuefeature contributions that delve into the mechanisms and disorders of social cognition, thus shedding light on what is required forsuccessful interactions with others in a social world.Decety et al. [28] pick up on the theme of empathy and take an integrative approach to investigating the mechanisms underlying thiskey process for interacting with and understanding others. They review the evolutionary basis of empathy and describe how ourimproved understanding of the mechanisms underlying empathy can lead to treatments for disorders of social interaction.Also focusing on empathy, de Guzman et al. [23] use an innovative training paradigm to test the hypothesis that bolstering self-otherdistinction should lead to increased empathy in a group of healthy young adults. In two independent experiments, the authorsdemonstrate that individuals who train to distinguish representations of self and other in the motor domain demonstrate increasedempathic responses, as measured by corticospinal responses and self-reported empathy. These findings highlight how an interventionin one socio-cognitive domain can change responses in another, and hold great promise for using behavioural interventions toimprove functioning across multiple social domains.The empirical contribution by Cross et al. [29] investigates the effect of similarity between self and other on social perception, usingartificial robotic agents in order to vary cues to human animacy. Cross et al. demonstrate that the neural mechanisms underlyingsocial perception are sensitive to beliefs regarding whether an agent has human or artificial origins, rather than simply to cuesindicating physical similarity. This suggests that interactions with others may be more strongly modulated by beliefs regarding self-other similarity than by actual physical similarity.The final group of papers in this theme issue focus on disorders of social cognition, and the extent to which these can be related toimpairment of specific versus more general socio-cognitive mechanisms, reflecting a theme common to other contributions (e.g. [18]).Leekam [30] focuses on the neurodevelopmental condition that is probably the prototypical example of a breakdown in self-otherunderstanding: autism spectrum disorder. She reviews the evidence for a 'primary" impairment in social cognition in autism,concluding that the data support a domain general, rather than social-specific, account of the difficulties encountered by people withautism. She calls for a broadening of the research focus to encompass non-social as well as social difficulties in autism.Hamilton [31] builds on previous work emphasizing the value of studying interactive social behaviour and social exchange to advanceour understanding of social cognition. She focuses on the meaning and value of direct gaze cues, and how the processing of these cuesdiffers in autism. In particular, Hamilton argues that direct gaze cues can act on a number of levels, from arousal and responsemodulation to self-engagement and reputation management, and highlights the importance of context effects when studying gaze inthe laboratory. She concludes by articulating specific factors to be examined and controlled when testing the neurocognitiveprocesses impacted by direct gaze cues, which might ultimately help researchers develop a theory of how a pair of eyes, whetherencountered in a drawing, photograph or a real person, can influence social cognition and behaviour in such a profound manner.Schilbach [32], a practising clinical psychiatrist, brings first-hand experience to his review of the reciprocal relationship betweenpsychiatric disorders and impaired social functioning. He advances the position that a range of psychiatric disorders, including autism,personality disorders, depression, schizophrenia, substance use disorders and social anxiety disorders, can be characterized asdisorders of social interaction. He concludes with a systematic discussion of how refocusing research attention on the dynamics ofsocial interaction in these disorders could provide fresh insights for social neuroscience as a discipline.The theme issue concludes with a commentary by Lamm et al. [24] that relates not only to socio-cognitive disorders but also tocontributions on the origins and development of self-other understanding in relation to empathy. The authors address how abreakdown in different components of the empathetic response-i.e. in either shared emotional representations between self andother or in the ability to distinguish between representations of self and other-is involved in disorders of social cognition.ConclusionIn this theme issue, our aim was to integrate research across a range of disciplines, investigating the phylogenetic and ontogeneticorigins of self-other understanding, the psychological and neuroscientific mechanisms underlying how other-related information isprocessed with respect to that relating to the self, and the consequences of atypicalities in either the origins or mechanisms for socialfunctioning. By exploring how research in each discipline depends on and is informed by advances in other fields, we hope this themeissue will facilitate the formulation of new questions and the generation of new insights into social cognition that transcend typicaldisciplinary boundaries.

Question

After reading this article discuss:Briefly summarize your source, the author’s credibility, and recommendations for improvement.Discuss what context you could apply the social cognition: understanding others and ourselves to. Be specific.Critique the recommendations and whether you find the recommendations useful. Explain why or why not. AbstractIn order to interpret and engage with the social world, individuals must understand how they relate to others. Self-otherunderstanding forms the backbone of social cognition and is a central concept explored by research into basic processes such asaction perception and empathy, as well as research on more sophisticated social behaviours such as cooperation and intergroupinteraction. This theme issue integrates the latest research into self-other understanding from evolutionary biology, anthropology,psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry. By gathering perspectives from a diverse range of disciplines, the contributions showcaseways in which research in these areas both informs and is informed by approaches spanning the biological and social sciences, thusdeepening our understanding of how we relate to others in a social world.IntroductionThe past 20 years have brought extraordinary progress to our understanding of social cognition. Evolutionary biologistshave uncovered sophisticated abilities in non-human primates, such as perspective taking [1,2] and social learning [3,4].Developmental psychologists and anthropologists have delineated both the universal origins and culturally variabletrajectories of pro-social abilities and morality [5-7]. At the same time, our understanding of the mechanisms underlyingsocial cognition has been both aided and challenged by the discovery of mirror neurons [8], a discovery which hassimultaneously confirmed the importance of self-related processing in understanding others [9-11], and raised furtherquestions about the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins of such mechanisms [12]. In the clinical domain, a growingappreciation of the heterogeneity present in socio-cognitive disorders (e.g. [13]) has led to an increased emphasis onunderstanding the mechanisms underlying deficits in specific socio-cognitive abilities, rather than considering clinicalgroups as presenting with homogeneous patterns of impairment [14-16].Despite the considerable advances each of these individual disciplines has contributed to our understanding of humansocial cognition, few opportunities exist for researchers across these fields to consider how their work informs and isinformed by related work in other disciplines. Core questions in human social cognition, such as how we use our ownexperience to understand the experience of others, and how we understand the ways in which we are connected toothers, tap into a key construct that transcends disciplinary boundaries: namely, the understanding of the relationshipbetween self and other. While the importance of characterizing the neurocognitive mechanisms and behaviouralconsequences of self-other understanding is clear, further progress in elucidating how self-other understandingcontributes to social interaction, and in improving self-other understanding in socio-cognitive disorders, will requireinterdisciplinary integration. To address this urgent need, this theme issue has been designed to facilitate theinterdisciplinary exchange that is required to advance both basic science and the clinical applications of social cognitionresearch.This theme issue brings together researchers from a rich array of disciplines to discuss the latest developments in self-other understanding. The issue is organized into two broad thematic strands. The first addresses the origins of socialcognition and the second addresses the processes supporting typical and atypical social cognition. The theme issuebegins with papers highlighting the latest comparative research on the phylogenetic origins of cooperation, andanthropological research into cultural influences on self-other relationships. Next, papers examining the developmentalorigins of social cognition articulate how self-other differentiation develops, and how young children demonstratesensitivity to self-other differentiation by dividing the world into social groups. The latter part of the issue focuses onmechanisms of social cognition. It includes empirical work exploring how training interventions aimed at improving self-other control processes can modulate empathy, and a study that investigates the underlying neural architectures thatsupport effective understanding of other agents, whether human or artificial. The theme issue concludes with a numberof contributions offering fresh insights and new theoretical proposals that address how the mechanisms underlying self-other understanding break down in disorders of social cognition, including autism, depression and schizophrenia.In order to facilitate interdisciplinary integration and exchange between the distinct disciplines and themes that arecovered in this issue, we have also asked researchers from three different backgrounds to compose commentary piecesthat not only review their own work on these topics but also relate it to the contributions from different disciplinaryperspectives, discussing how work in their own field informs, or is informed by, work in other areas. Our aim is that thesecommentary pieces will help to break down traditional disciplinary barriers and so prompt progress that is not possiblewhen each discipline operates in isolation.The contributors to this theme issue are seeking novel answers to the overarching questions which define the field,including: What are the evolutionary and cultural origins of our social cognitive abilities? How do innate predispositionsinteract with the environment across development? What are the cognitive mechanisms underlying self-otherunderstanding and are they uniquely social or domain general in nature? How can we harness our knowledge of socialcognition to understand atypical development and cognition? These questions are deeply interconnected andinherently interdisciplinary in nature. Building on these questions, the following sections highlight the maincontributions made by each paper to this theme issue. Origins: the evolution and development of social cognitionThe first area of investigation in this theme issue draws upon research placed at the interface between evolutionary biology,psychology and anthropology. Several papers address the origins of human social abilities, using a variety of complementaryapproaches to investigate how human biology interacts with cultural influences to produce variation in self-otherunderstanding between social groups. Schmelz & Call [17] begin with an evolutionary approach, critically reviewing theexperimental literature on how chimpanzees interact with each other through cooperation and competition. They highlight theneed to study social cognitive skills, as well as social motivation, within the context of both cooperation and competition.Heyes [18] focuses on the importance of learning and proposes that cultural practices may influence the development of socialabilities. Taking the specific example of imitation, she deconstructs the widely held belief among developmental andcomparative psychologists that the superior imitation abilities of humans are due to a special, evolved in-built' matchingmechanism [19] that endows us with the ability to match representations of self and other. She argues instead that the ability toimitate may be the result of cultural practices, and that the associative sequence learning (ASL) model of imitation provides analternative account supported by empirical evidence. To further support this claim, she systematically addresses sevenpossible criticisms of the ASL model.Keller [20] also emphasizes learning but takes a cross-cultural approach to the development of understanding self and other.She discusses two key dimensions of social relationships into which children may be socialized: autonomy and relatedness.Taking the examples of middle class German children and the children of Nso farmers in North Western Cameroon, shedescribes how parenting practices may lead children to have a more autonomous or more relational understanding of theirrelationship to others.The commentary by Nielsen & Haun [21] draws together the approaches mentioned here. It emphasizes the importance ofadopting a comparative and cross-cultural approach to understanding development in particular, and social cognition moregenerally. Nielsen & Haun review the literature on social learning, cooperation, prosociality and theory of mind usingdevelopmental, comparative and cross-cultural evidence. They highlight the importance of social motivation in explaininguniquely human forms of social cognitive abilities such as imitation and cooperation.The next group of papers complement this evolutionary perspective by focusing more specifically on the development of self-other understanding across a variety of different processes, from empathy to group membership. Steinbeis [22] describes theneurodevelopmental underpinnings of the ability to distinguish between representations of the self and of others during socialinteraction. He sets out a contrast between the process of self-other distinction in cognitive and affective domains that is alsodiscussed in later contributions [23,24]. Steinbeis' review describes how the ability to distinguish between self and otheremerges in early childhood, and the development of this ability into adulthood.Over's paper [25] picks up on the theme of motivation and explores the developmental origins of our need to belong. Bymarshalling evidence from developmental and social psychology, she crafts a compelling case for the importance of socialmotivation for understanding social behaviour. She concludes by arguing that, in order to understand better social cognitionand behaviour in individuals of all ages, it will be imperative to develop a new programme of experimental research thatsystematically examines the role played by social motivation across development.McAuliffe & Dunham [26] adopt an intergroup perspective on the relationship between self and other and discuss why childrenprefer members of their own group. They discuss evidence that both adults and children tend to share more resources withmembers of their own group and critically evaluate why this is. They conclude that, although the pattern of evidence is complex,the data are broadly consistent with an account based on general affective preferences.The commentary by Milward & Sebanz [27] addresses how mechanisms underpinning self-other distinctions develop. Theauthors examine how the other contributions in this section might help us to understand more deeply the role played byempathy during social interaction. They offer insights into how we accomplish actions cooperatively with others, andstage for uniting the relatively independent literatures concerning dyadic and group-based interactions.Processes: mechanisms and disorders of social cognitionThe second key theme of this issue relates to the processes underlying social cognition. The latter two sections of the special issuefeature contributions that delve into the mechanisms and disorders of social cognition, thus shedding light on what is required forsuccessful interactions with others in a social world.Decety et al. [28] pick up on the theme of empathy and take an integrative approach to investigating the mechanisms underlying thiskey process for interacting with and understanding others. They review the evolutionary basis of empathy and describe how ourimproved understanding of the mechanisms underlying empathy can lead to treatments for disorders of social interaction.Also focusing on empathy, de Guzman et al. [23] use an innovative training paradigm to test the hypothesis that bolstering self-otherdistinction should lead to increased empathy in a group of healthy young adults. In two independent experiments, the authorsdemonstrate that individuals who train to distinguish representations of self and other in the motor domain demonstrate increasedempathic responses, as measured by corticospinal responses and self-reported empathy. These findings highlight how an interventionin one socio-cognitive domain can change responses in another, and hold great promise for using behavioural interventions toimprove functioning across multiple social domains.The empirical contribution by Cross et al. [29] investigates the effect of similarity between self and other on social perception, usingartificial robotic agents in order to vary cues to human animacy. Cross et al. demonstrate that the neural mechanisms underlyingsocial perception are sensitive to beliefs regarding whether an agent has human or artificial origins, rather than simply to cuesindicating physical similarity. This suggests that interactions with others may be more strongly modulated by beliefs regarding self-other similarity than by actual physical similarity.The final group of papers in this theme issue focus on disorders of social cognition, and the extent to which these can be related toimpairment of specific versus more general socio-cognitive mechanisms, reflecting a theme common to other contributions (e.g. [18]).Leekam [30] focuses on the neurodevelopmental condition that is probably the prototypical example of a breakdown in self-otherunderstanding: autism spectrum disorder. She reviews the evidence for a 'primary&#34; impairment in social cognition in autism,concluding that the data support a domain general, rather than social-specific, account of the difficulties encountered by people withautism. She calls for a broadening of the research focus to encompass non-social as well as social difficulties in autism.Hamilton [31] builds on previous work emphasizing the value of studying interactive social behaviour and social exchange to advanceour understanding of social cognition. She focuses on the meaning and value of direct gaze cues, and how the processing of these cuesdiffers in autism. In particular, Hamilton argues that direct gaze cues can act on a number of levels, from arousal and responsemodulation to self-engagement and reputation management, and highlights the importance of context effects when studying gaze inthe laboratory. She concludes by articulating specific factors to be examined and controlled when testing the neurocognitiveprocesses impacted by direct gaze cues, which might ultimately help researchers develop a theory of how a pair of eyes, whetherencountered in a drawing, photograph or a real person, can influence social cognition and behaviour in such a profound manner.Schilbach [32], a practising clinical psychiatrist, brings first-hand experience to his review of the reciprocal relationship betweenpsychiatric disorders and impaired social functioning. He advances the position that a range of psychiatric disorders, including autism,personality disorders, depression, schizophrenia, substance use disorders and social anxiety disorders, can be characterized asdisorders of social interaction. He concludes with a systematic discussion of how refocusing research attention on the dynamics ofsocial interaction in these disorders could provide fresh insights for social neuroscience as a discipline.The theme issue concludes with a commentary by Lamm et al. [24] that relates not only to socio-cognitive disorders but also tocontributions on the origins and development of self-other understanding in relation to empathy. The authors address how abreakdown in different components of the empathetic response-i.e. in either shared emotional representations between self andother or in the ability to distinguish between representations of self and other-is involved in disorders of social cognition.ConclusionIn this theme issue, our aim was to integrate research across a range of disciplines, investigating the phylogenetic and ontogeneticorigins of self-other understanding, the psychological and neuroscientific mechanisms underlying how other-related information isprocessed with respect to that relating to the self, and the consequences of atypicalities in either the origins or mechanisms for socialfunctioning. By exploring how research in each discipline depends on and is informed by advances in other fields, we hope this themeissue will facilitate the formulation of new questions and the generation of new insights into social cognition that transcend typicaldisciplinary boundaries.

Accepted Answer

The article explores self-other understanding, a fundamental aspect of social cognition. The…