Interpersonal Cognitive Biases in Children and Young People with Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Systematic Review

Purpose of Review Interpersonal cognitive biases have been linked to externalising and internalising problems. This systematic review investigates their role in children and young people with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), who have a high risk of experiencing such problems. Recent Findings With 16 identified studies, this is a widely under-recognised research area. The three studies conducted within the last 5 years focused on threat interpretation and its association with anxiety. No difference between children and young people with and without NDD was found in the eleven studies investigating hostile attribution of intent, of which the most recent is nearly a decade old. No studies addressed attention or memory bias towards ambiguous interpersonal information. Summary The scarcity and heterogeneity of research highlighted in this paper demonstrate the urgency to use standardised and accessible research methods to develop a strong evidence base regarding the potential content-specific interpretation bias in individuals with NDD.

The Effects of Subthreshold Autistic Traits On Time Perception: The Regulation of Interpersonal Information Association

Background People with high subthreshold autistic traits usually show structural impairments like those with autism spectrum disorder, but with less social and cognitive impairments. The effect of autistic traits on time perception and the role of interpersonal information on this effect remains unexplored. Methods This study used a temporal bisection task between 400–1600 ms to compare the time perception of individuals with higher and lower autistic traits, and to explore the influence of interpersonal information on their time perception by establishing associations between interpersonal information and geometric figures. A total of 32 participants with high autistic traits and 31 participants with low autistic traits took part in the study. Results In the absence of identity information, people with high autistic traits tended to judge short durations as longer, and their Weber ratio was higher than those with low autistic traits, suggesting that their overestimation of short duration is due to decreased temporal sensitivity and increased internal clock frequency. With the addition of interpersonal information, individuals with high and low autistic traits had faster responses to self in the identity-figure association, and the subjective bisection point was shorter. However, it took longer for individuals with high autistic traits to build the self-association, and there was no difference in the proportion of long response and Weber ratio between individuals with high and low autistic traits when identity was involved. Conclusion These results suggest that individuals with high autistic traits have a higher central tendency, and this change is related to the decline of perceptual sensitivity. Actively guiding attention to interpersonal information can improve the time perception sensitivity of individuals with high autistic traits.

Social globalisation and quality of democracy: An analysis for old and young democracies

The literature on globalisation and democracy has primarily paid attention to economic integration and its effects on democracies. Systematic empirical evidence on the effects of social globalisation on democracy is absent. This article intends to fill this gap. Social globalisation is disaggregated into interpersonal, information and cultural globalisation. I apply the generalised method of moments estimation and analyse democracies encompassing the periods 1970–1991 and 1991–2017. The results indicate that the democratic qualities affected by social globalisation are freedom of expression, equal access and protection, and the quality of elections. The moderating effect of a given country’s democracy stock has been confirmed across different estimations. However, and especially during the post–Cold War period, younger and older democracies benefit equally from the increased spread of information caused by globalisation with regard to equal access. Equally, both categories experience similar challenges with the rise of interpersonal globalisation in terms of the quality of elections.

Formal Hierarchies and Informal Networks: How Organizational Structure Shapes Information Search in Local Government

Attention to informal communication networks within public organizations has grown in recent decades. While research has documented the role of individual cognition and social structure in understanding information search in organizations, this article emphasizes the importance of formal hierarchy. We argue that the structural attributes of bureaucracies are too important to be neglected when modeling knowledge flows in public organizations. Empirically, we examine interpersonal information seeking patterns among 143 employees in a small city government, using exponential random graph modeling (ERGM). The results suggest that formal structure strongly shapes information search patterns while accounting for social network variables and individual-level perceptions. We find that formal status, permission pathways, and departmental membership all affect employees’ information search. Understanding the effects of organizational structure on information search networks will offer opportunities to improve information flows in public organizations via design choices.

Comment: The Next Frontier: Prosody Research Gets Interpersonal

Neurocognitive models (e.g., Schirmer & Kotz, 2006) have helped to characterize how listeners incrementally derive meaning from vocal expressions of emotion in spoken language, what neural mechanisms are involved at different processing stages, and their relative time course. But how can these insights be applied to communicative situations in which prosody serves a predominantly interpersonal function? This comment examines recent data highlighting the dynamic interplay of prosody and language, when vocal attributes serve the sociopragmatic goals of the speaker or reveal interpersonal information that listeners use to construct a mental representation of what is being communicated. Our comment serves as a beacon to researchers interested in how the neurocognitive system “makes sense” of socioemotive aspects of prosody.

A Longitudinal Exploration of Infants’ Social Looks in Naturalistic Settings

Most social referencing studies have examined how infants use non-verbal, affective information from an adult to disambiguate an uncertain object, an event or situation in order to regulate their behaviour (Campos & Stenberg,1981; Feinman,1982, 1992) using experimental designs within laboratory settings. Clyman, Emde, Kempe & Harmon, (1986) – responding to these highly contrived social referencing paradigms - conducted a semi-naturalistic study of social referencing and social looks to examine types of social looks functioning as infants’ gathering information from the adult. The authors created a typology of 8 types of social looks using a modified version of the ‘Stranger Situation’ paradigm. Despite Clyman et al.’s attempts to shift social referencing research into qualitative approaches, the study encountered some pragmatical and conceptual difficulties that affected the reliability of the typology. This thesis is an extension of the work conducted by Clyman et al., (1986) by longitudinally exploring social looks in naturalistic settings at three different developmental time points (Time 1=12-14 months; Time 2=15-17 months; Time 3=24-26 months). Through coding analysis of behavioural observations, a typology of 14 descriptive looking concepts was created, embedded within six different social dimensions. The novel typology was applied to a small cohort of infants at-risk of being autistic (n=2). Quantitative analysis provided additional information related to patterns of social looks amongst infants across time points as well as in comparison with the two infants at-risk. Results showed that infants used looking as both direct and indirect forms of social participation. Additionally, infants’ elicitation of social looks is characterised by being socially mediated by adults and highly influenced by the context, providing the necessary interpersonal information to make meaning of social interactions as well as macro-structural knowledge of norms and expectations of the setting. Distribution of looks showed that the two most prevalent categories across the three-time points corresponded to ‘Watching an Adult’ and ‘Glancing’. These findings differ from those of the Clyman et al., (1986) study, where ‘Initiates Bids for Interaction’ category – both short and long - represented the most frequent look. This thesis found similar results concerning social referencing looks, as represented one of the least frequent categories. Infants at-risk presented a different pattern of looking as ‘Glancing’ constituted the most prominent look followed by ‘Watching the Adult’. This thesis constitutes the first longitudinal study that conceptualises infants’ social looks within naturalistic settings, contributing to knowledge on attentional processes and how they might influence infants’ social development. Additionally, it provides preliminary data of possible differences in social looking in infants at-risk of being autistic.