Social cognition or social class and culture? On the interpretation of differences in social cognitive performance
Social cognition or social class and culture? On the interpretation of differences in social cognitive performance
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DOI：
10.1017/s003329171800404x
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发表时间：
2020-01-01
影响因子：
6.9
通讯作者：
Germine, Laura T.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Dodell-Feder, David;Ressler, Kerry J.;Germine, Laura T.
背景理解他人心理状态的能力对心理和身体健康有着深远的影响，因此有效和可靠地评估心理状态理解（MSU）至关重要。然而，最广泛使用的和目前NIMH推荐的任务评估MSU -阅读在眼睛的心灵任务（RMET）-遭受潜在的评估问题，包括依赖于参与者的词汇/智力和使用文化偏见的刺激。在这里，我们评估的影响，人口和社会文化因素（年龄，性别，教育，种族，种族）的RMET和其他社会和非社会认知任务的努力，以确定在何种程度上的RMET可能会受到不适当的影响参与者的特征。总共有40248名年龄在10岁到70岁之间的国际母语/主要说英语的参与者完成了TestMyBrain.org上的五项测量之一：RMET，RMET的缩短版本，多种族情感识别任务，情感辨别任务和非社会/非语言处理速度任务（数字符号匹配）。与其他任务相反，RMET的表现在整个生命周期中都有所提高。教育、种族和民族比其他任务解释了更多的RMET表现的差异，并且教育、种族和民族之间的差异对于RMET比其他任务更明显，例如受教育程度更高、非西班牙裔和白色/高加索人表现最好。这些数据表明，RMET可能会受到社会阶层和文化的过度影响，对社会地位和精神疾病之间存在差异的临床人群评估MSU构成了严重挑战。
Background. The ability to understand others' mental states carries profound consequences for mental and physical health, making efforts at validly and reliably assessing mental state understanding (MSU) of utmost importance. However, the most widely used and current NIMH-recommended task for assessing MSU - the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (RMET) - suffers from potential assessment issues, including reliance on a participant's vocabulary/intelligence and the use of culturally biased stimuli. Here, we evaluate the impact of demographic and sociocultural factors (age, gender, education, ethnicity, race) on the RMET and other social and non-social cognitive tasks in an effort to determine the extent to which the RMET may be unduly influenced by participant characteristics.Methods. In total, 40 248 international, native-/primarily English-speaking participants between the ages of 10 and 70 completed one of five measures on TestMyBrain.org: RMET, a shortened version of RMET, a multiracial emotion identification task, an emotion discrimination task, and a non-social/non-verbal processing speed task (digit symbol matching).Results. Contrary to other tasks, performance on the RMET increased across the lifespan. Education, race, and ethnicity explained more variance in RMET performance than the other tasks, and differences between levels of education, race, and ethnicity were more pronounced for the RMET than the other tasks such that more highly educated, non-Hispanic, and White/Caucasian individuals performed best.Conclusions. These data suggest that the RMET may be unduly influenced by social class and culture, posing a serious challenge to assessing MSU in clinical populations given shared variance between social status and psychiatric illness.