This study was designed to elucidate the association between attachment and emotional understanding in preschool children. Forty children between the ages of 2.5 and 6 years and their mothers participated in the study. Mothers completed the Attachment Q-set, and children took part at their preschools in both an affective perspective-taking task and a series of interviews concerning naturally oc...

Empathy allows us to internally simulate the affective and cognitive mental states of others. Neurobiological studies suggest that empathy is a complex phenomenon, which can be described using a model that includes 2 modes of processing: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up neural processing is achieved via the mirroring representation systems that play a key role in the direct sharing of the emot...

Developmental research on spatial perspective taking has shown that young children are able to solve perspective-taking problems under favorable circumstances, but they have difficulties succeeding in classic tasks involving a conflict between one's own perspective and that of another observer. To date, little is known about the reasons for young children's difficulties in dealing with incongru...

Numerous studies have found that perspective-taking reduces stereotyping and prejudice, but they have only involved negative stereotypes. Because target negativity has been empirically confounded with reduced stereotyping, the general effects of perspective-taking on stereotyping and prejudice are unclear. By including both positivelyand negatively-stereotyped targets, this research offers the ...

Comprehension of insincere communication is an important aspect of social cognition requiring visual perspective taking, emotion reading, and understanding others' thoughts, opinions, and intentions. Someone who is lying intends to hide their insincerity from the listener, while a sarcastic speaker wants the listener to recognize they are speaking insincerely. We investigated whether face-to-fa...

We tested whether putting oneself in the shoes of others is easier for women, possibly as a function of individuals' empathy levels, and whether any sex difference might be modulated by the sex of presented figures. Participants (N=100, 50 women) imagined (a) being in the spatial position of front-facing and back-facing female and male figures (third person perspective (3PP) task) and (b) that ...

Humans are able to mentally adopt the spatial perspective of others and represent the visual world from their point of view. Here, we present neuropsychological evidence that information inaccessible from an egocentric perspective can be accessed from the perspective of another person. Patients affected by left neglect were asked to describe arrays of objects from their own egocentric perspecti...

BACKGROUND Deficits in cognitive and/or affective perspective-taking have been implicated in Conduct-Disorder (CD), but empirical investigations produced equivocal results. Two factors may be implicated: (a) distinct deficits underlying the antisocial conduct of CD subgroups, (b) plausible disjunction between cognitive and affective perspective-taking with subgroups presenting either cognitive ...