The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders [ASD] in epilepsy is approximately 20%-32%, with previous research reporting high rates of under-diagnosis of ASD in epilepsy. Current psychological assessments were adapted to provide epilepsy-specific measures of behaviour, which increased validity by addressing specific methodological problems highlighted by several researchers. The initial experiments provided a comprehensive investigation of autistic traits and characteristics in a heterogeneous group of adults with epilepsy without any ASD diagnosis to quantify the extent to which autistic characteristics are related to seizure activity. Adults with epilepsy showed higher autistic traits and impaired social responsiveness while systemizing and empathising abilities remained intact. Further, autistic traits and impaired social responsiveness increased again during seizure activity. Social responsiveness positively correlated with anti-epileptic drug [AED] control. Adults with epilepsy and seizure remission demonstrated significant improvements in restricted, repetitive behaviours compared to adults with current epileptic seizures. Together, these results demonstrate a relationship between seizure activity and autistic characteristics, and are consistent with previous suggestions that AEDs may mask autistic characteristics. The impaired social skills and communication are consistent with research suggesting that the pathogenesis of epilepsy may disrupt social functioning. However, whether this can be directly attributed to social cognitive deficits remains uncertain. The main research addresses this uncertainty by conducting three experiments to assess the Somatic Marker Hypothesis and the mechanisms which underpin it. The rationale is to establish whether this is a valid explanatory model for disrupted neurobiological factors implicated in social cognitive processing. This hypothesis is appropriate for investigating adults with epilepsy, some who may have developed typical social abilities in early life before epilepsy onset. Results from the IOWA Gambling Task demonstrated that adults with epilepsy had impaired decision making abilities compromising somatic marker formation, crucial for social cognition. However, this deficit occurred in the absence of other socio-emotional and memory impairments. In conclusion, adults with epilepsy have a higher rate of autistic characteristics, and their social difficulties may be associated with compromised somatic marker formation. Future research needs to determine the heritability of these autistic traits and characteristics.

Learning and memory abilities decline with age; however collaborative learning with a familiar partner has been found to improve older adults’ performance on memory tasks and reduce these age-related differences. However it is unclear whether collaborating with a familiar partner is more beneficial to learning compared with collaborating with a stranger. Similarly, it is unclear whether older adults collaborate similarly with human and computer partners. The aim of this PhD thesis is to understand the role of collaborator identity on collaborative learning, and to investigate whether collaborative learning is as efficient and accurate with a range of learning partners. While collaborative learning is a socially-based memory task, the relationships between collaborative learning and social cognition have not yet been explored. The secondary aim of this thesis is to use experimental collaborative learning paradigms alongside standardised and experimental measures of social cognition to explore whether social cognition accounts for a significant amount of variance in collaborative learning performance with different partners. Two studies compare younger and older adults’ learning with familiar and unfamiliar partners on different collaborative learning paradigms. Two subsequent studies compare older adults’ learning on computerised versions of the collaborative learning tasks with partners they perceive to be humans or computers based on recordings of natural human or synthetic speech respectively. In all studies, measures of social cognition were used to assess whether social abilities affect learning outcomes with different partner types. When comparing older and younger adults’ results, familiarity had no effect on learning or immediate or delayed recall performance. Older adults initially took longer to complete the learning trials but performed with similar efficiency as younger adults by the final trials. Younger and older adults recalled collaboratively learned information with comparable accuracy after a delay of one hour, however after one week, older adults recalled the route less accurately than younger adults. Social cognition was not related to collaborative learning with familiar partners, but was related with unfamiliar partners, suggesting that those who are better able to take the perspective of another person may benefit during interactive learning. Social cognition was related to collaborative learning with perceived human partners but not perceived computer partners. This thesis offers a new perspective on the interplay between social and cognitive function in collaborative learning with different learning partners, and explores the differences between younger and older adults when learning collaboratively. The findings are discussed in relation to cognitive, social, and technological theories. On the whole, collaborative learning can result in older adults learning with similar speed and accuracy to younger adults; while familiarity does not improve learning outcomes, perceived human-ness does.

A versão infantil do Teste de Ler a Mente nos Olhos (Reading the Mind in Eyes Test - Child Version ) de Simon Baron-Cohen, é composto por 28 fotografias da região dos olhos de indivíduos com diferentes expressões e tem como objetivo uma quantificação da habilidade do indivíduo em inferir estados mentais a partir de expressões faciais, sendo usualmente utilizado como um instrumento para avaliação de Teoria da Mente. Neste trabalho foi feito um estudo de validade de uma versão em português do teste, visando maiores esclarecimentos acerca de suas propriedades psicométricas. O teste foi aplicado em uma amostra controle de 434 crianças de dois estados brasileiros, São Paulo e Santa Catarina, cursando o ensino fundamental e em uma amostra clínica de 20 crianças diagnosticadas com Transtornos do Espectro do Autismo. Foram encontrados um índice de consistência interna (alfa de Cronbach) de 0,718 e variância estatisticamente significativa de acordo com o ano escolar. Não foram encontradas diferenças significativas com relação ao sexo e Estado. Não houve diferença estatisticamente significativa nos escores dos grupos controle e clínico. Os resultados foram, portanto, parcialmente favoráveis para validade de construto, mas não foram encontradas evidências de validade critério / The \"Reading the Mind in Eyes Test - Child Version\" by Simon Baron-Cohen, consists of 28 photographs of the eye region of people with different expressions and aim a quantification of the individual\'s ability to infer mental states from facial expressions, and is usually used as an instrument for assessing Theory of Mind. This paper is a study of validity of a Portuguese version of the test, seeking further clarification about its psychometric properties. The test was applied to a control group of 434 children from two Brazilian states, Sao Paulo and Santa Catarina, in elementary school and a clinical group of 20 children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders. We found an index of internal consistency (Cronbach\'s alpha) of 0.718 and statistically significant variance in accordance with the school year. There were no significant differences with regard to gender and state. There was no statistically significant difference in the scores of clinical and control groups. The results were therefore partially favorable to construct validity, but there was no evidence of criterion validity

During collaboration, people communicate using verbal and non-verbal cues, including gaze cues. Spoken language is usually the primary medium of communication in these interactions, yet despite this co-occurrence of speech and gaze cueing, most experiments have used paradigms without language. Furthermore, previous research has shown that myriad social factors influence behaviour during interactions, yet most studies investigating responses to gaze have been conducted in a lab, far removed from any natural interaction. It was the aim of this thesis to investigate the relationship between language and gaze cue utilisation in natural collaborations. For this reason, the initial study was largely observational, allowing for spontaneous natural language and gaze. Participants were found to rarely look at their partners, but to do so strategically, with listeners looking more at speakers when the latter were of higher social status. Eye movement behaviour also varied with the type of language used in instructions, so in a second study, a more controlled (but still real-world) paradigm was used to investigate the effect of language type on gaze utilisation. Participants used gaze cues flexibly, by seeking and following gaze more when the cues were accompanied by distinct featural verbal information compared to overlapping spatial verbal information. The remaining three studies built on these findings to investigate the relationship between language and gaze using a much more controlled paradigm. Gaze and language cues were reduced to equivalent artificial stimuli and the reliability of each cue was manipulated. Even in this artificial paradigm, language was preferred when cues were equally reliable, supporting the idea that gaze cues are supportive to language. Typical gaze cueing effects were still found, however the size of these effects was modulated by gaze cue reliability. Combined, the studies in this thesis show that although gaze cues may automatically and quickly affect attention, their use in natural communication is mediated by the form and content of concurrent spoken language.

Philosophical and psychological theories of social understanding have largely focused on the construct of “theory of mind” (ToM) and the inferential processes that may be necessary for understanding the meaning of others’ behaviour. On these traditional accounts, social understanding has often been described as a process of “mind reading” or “mentalizing”, where one imputes mental states to others to make sense of their behaviour. However, recent work from social neuroscience and enactivist and phenomenological perspectives have pointed to the importance of considering non-inferential forms of social understanding that may be a more basic or foundational way in which we understand others. This dissertation investigates the relationship between these different forms of social understanding by examining the role of perceptual, motor, and conceptual processes in how we understand others. One hundred and two older adolescents and adults completed a battery of psychophysical and paper & pencil tasks. Correlations showed coherence amongst measures that assessed participants’ perceptual sensitivity to social information, with minimal coherence across “theory of mind” tasks. Exploratory factor analysis conducted on 13 measures yielded a meaningful 4 factor solution that supported the distinction between conceptual or inferential measures and more direct, perceptual forms of social understanding. Overall, the findings from this study highlight the importance of considering the variety of ways in which we can understand others and provides empirical support for a more pluralistic and comprehensive account of social understanding. / Graduate / 2020-10-23

Cognitive impairment is a key characteristic of schizophrenia and is a clear predictor of functional outcome. This thesis explores the relationship between cognitive ability relating to social and non-social processing. Schizophrenia patients demonstrate an impaired ability to recognise, label and discriminate emotional expression within the face. The underlying mechanisms behind this social cognitive impairment are not yet fully understood. This thesis explores the notion that a basic perceptual impairment in processing facial information adversely impacts on the perception of more complex information derived from faces, such as emotional expression. Face perception relies on processing the featural characteristics of a face as well as the relationship between these features. Information pertaining to the spatial distances between features is referred to as configural information. / A group of schizophrenia patients and healthy control participants completed a battery of tasks that assessed basic neurocognition, facial emotion processing and configural face processing. A model of face processing was proposed and used to systematically pinpoint specific deficits that may contribute to impaired face processing in schizophrenia. The results indicated that schizophrenia patients show impairments on three broad constructs; basic neurocognition, facial emotion processing, and most pertinently, deficits in configural processing. It was revealed that although neurocognitive and face processing both explained a significant proportion of the variance in facial emotion processing, the effect of neurocognition was indirect and mediated by face processing. / To investigate the diagnostic specificity of these findings, a group of bipolar disorder patients was also tested on the task battery. The results indicated that bipolar disorder patients also show social and non-social cognitive impairments, however, not as severe as that demonstrated by the schizophrenia patients. Furthermore, the effect of neurocognitive performance on facial emotion processing appeared more direct for bipolar disorder patients compared to schizophrenia patients. Although deficits in face processing were observable in bipolar, they were not specific to configural processing. Thus, deficits in emotion processing were more associated to neurocognitive ability in bipolar disorder patients, and more associated to configural face processing in schizophrenia patients. The configural processing deficits in schizophrenia are discussed as a lower-order perception problem. In conclusion, the results of this thesis are discussed in terms of their implication for treatment.

Patients with schizophrenia have extremely high levels of depression and suicide (Carlborg et al., 2008), thus, a better understanding of factors associated with poor quality of life (QoL) for this population is sorely needed. A growing body of research suggests that cognitive functioning in schizophrenia may be a strong predictor of overall QoL (Green et al., 2000), but individual domains of QoL have not been examined. Indirect evidence also suggests that emotion perception may underlie the relationship between neurocognition and QoL, but this hypothesis has also yet to be tested. Using a sample of 92 clinically stable schizophrenia patients, the current study explores the relationship between neurocognition, namely attention and working memory, and the following sub domains of QoL: social, vocational, intrapsychic foundations and environmental engagement. The current study also examines whether emotion perception mediates this relationship. In partial support of hypotheses, patients with more deficits in working memory reported decreased Occupational QoL and, although only marginally significant, decreased Total QoL. There was also a trend for poorer working memory to be associated with poorer Intrapsychic Foundations QoL. Contrary to hypotheses, emotion perception was not found to mediate the relationship between working memory and QoL. Current findings suggest that interventions that specifically target working memory may also improve many other aspects of schizophrenia patients? QoL.

The aim of this essay is to investigate how paranoid and non-paranoid schizophrenic patients differ in the processing of emotional facial expressions from healthy individuals, and how this could lead to deficits in the area of social cognition. Researchers have conducted many behavioral and neuroimaging studies on facial emotion processing and emotion recognition in schizophrenia. Several studies have shown that individuals with schizophrenia have deficits in recognizing and processing emotional facial stimuli. It is known that patients with different subtypes of schizophrenia also show differences in facial emotion processing. It has also been shown that patients with schizophrenia uses different strategies in the processing of emotional faces compared to healthy individuals.

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder characterized by social dysfunction. People with schizophrenia misinterpret social information and it is suggested that this difficulty may result from visual processing deficits. As faces are one of the most important sources of social information it is hypothesized that people suffering from the disorder have impairments in the visual face processing system. It is unclear which mechanism of the face processing system is impaired but two types of deficits are most often proposed: a deficit in face perception in general (i.e., processing of facial features as such) and a deficit in facial emotion processing (i.e., recognition of emotional facial expressions). Due to the contradictory evidence from behavioural, electrophysiological as well as neuroimaging studies offering support for the involvement of one or the other deficit in schizophrenia it is early to make any conclusive statements as to the nature and level of impairment. Further studies are needed for a better understanding of the key mechanism and abnormalities underlying social dysfunction in schizophrenia.

In this thesis I have investigated the process of self-schematic transformation that has been argued that offenders undergo in order to desist from crime. In this thesis I have used narrative interviews with twelve desisting offenders consisting of five non-violent offenders and seven violent offenders. I have analysed these narratives using a social cognitive perspective in order to seek an understanding of the self-schemas of the offenders. The results show that the desistance is the result of a longer process and the turning point experienced by the participants were the high point of this process. Social influences were highly important for both groups. Both groups were low in agency, with the exception to their new selves and the desisting process; still, the violent offenders were somewhat higher than the non-violent offenders. In general both groups used outside sources to explain their past crimes and substance abuse, though the violent offenders did this in less extent. Further, the analysis showed that the self-schema of the desisting offenders could be divided into three parts; the former self, the true self, and the new self, or who they used to be, who they have always been, and who they are now. The degree to which the offenders expressed these different selves varied between the two groups.