Social Cognition

The mental processes in which individuals are involved with when making sense of the social world, including the understanding of self, others, and the interplay between self and others, are what is called social cognition (Lewis 1999; Beer and Ochsner 2006). Social cognition broadly includes the cognitive processes that enables spontaneous decoding and encoding (provide correct interpretation) of verbal and nonverbal social and emotional cues, the ability to recognize central and peripheral social and emotional information, the knowledge of different social behaviors and their consequences in diverse social tasks (e.g., social knowledge and understanding), and the ability to make an adequate attribution about another person’s mental state (i.e., “theory of mind” abilities, Perner and Wimmer 1985), as well as about the self (Crick and Dodge 1994; Lewis 1999).