What is social cognition?

Social cognition is the set of cognitive and emotional processes used to interpret, analyze, remember, and apply information about oneself, others, and social relationships to guide behavior.

How does social cognition relate to emotions?

It enables interpretation of one’s own and others’ emotions, supports perspective-taking and empathy, and helps predict others’ thoughts and likely social reactions.

Can social cognition be trained?

Social cognition can be improved through cognitive stimulation exercises that practice emotion recognition, perspective-taking, social reasoning, and contextual interpretation.

What is an emotion recognition exercise?

An emotion recognition exercise asks users to match facial expressions or images with emotion labels, training social cognition and reasoning through repeated identification tasks.

What are internal states and social scripts exercises?

These tasks prompt users to describe characters’ feelings and likely reactions in stories, fostering understanding of internal states, expression, and appropriate social responses.

What cognitive skills do social cognition exercises target?

Exercises commonly target social cognition, reasoning, vocabulary, emotional expression, and perspective-taking to improve interpretation of social cues and appropriate behavior.

How to understand people: social cognition exercises

Do you know which cognitive function allows us to interpret other people’s emotions? Can you recognize which function is responsible for our ability to understand what others think in certain situations? Or, could you identify why we behave in a socially appropriate way in certain circumstances? We do all of this thanks to social cognition, and today we present several exercises to stimulate it.

Definition

Social cognition is the set of cognitive processes and emotional processes through which we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world.

It refers to how we think about ourselves, about others and their behavior, and about social relationships. It also refers to how we make sense of all that information and produce behaviors based on it.

Social cognition and emotions

Social cognition allows us to interpret our own and other people’s emotions. Ultimately it enables us to understand other people. That is, it involves putting yourself in others’ shoes and taking their point of view into account.

And can this cognitive function be trained? Yes. Social cognition, like all cognitive functions, can be trained through cognitive stimulation.

Social cognition exercises

1. Emotion recognition

In this exercise the user has to try to recognize the emotions shown and match them with the terms that define them. In the example the user must identify whether the woman in the image shows admiration, calm, or relief.

NeuronUP Activities - Emotion recognition

With this cognitive stimulation activity you work on social cognition and reasoning.

2. Inferring Facial Expressions

In this second exercise the user has to choose from several options the one that would correspond to the hidden face shown in the photo.

What expression does the child in the photo have?

NeuronUP Activities - Inferring Facial Expressions

Similarly, by doing this exercise the adult will work on two cognitive functions: social cognition and reasoning.

3. Emotional reaction to situations

This activity consists of determining in which situations it is logical to react in the way shown. In this case, the user must identify whether they find it logical that this older person makes that face when they see a stranger listening to their granddaughter’s conversation or when they see their grandson, who is buzzed, combing his hair

NeuronUP Activities - Emotional reaction to situations

In this case this works on social cognition, vocabulary, and reasoning.

4. Internal States

This activity consists of explaining the Internal States of the characters in the presented stories by creating social scripts.

The man may react differently than what is shown in the photo. The goal is for the adult to think about what the man feels in each case and complete the sentence. It will target social cognition, expression, and reasoning.

5. Word-Emotion Association

In this activity, the aim is to match the emotions shown with the terms that define them.

NeuronUP Activities - Word-Emotion Association-2

This trains social cognition, reasoning, and vocabulary.

6. Correspondence Emotional Reaction and Situation

In this last activity we propose today, the user must decide and justify whether the emotional reaction shown in the photo is congruent with the situation presented.

For example, in the following photo we see a doctor smiling. This doctor is telling a patient that the operation they are going to perform is risky. The user has to deduce whether the doctor is behaving normally by smiling or, on the contrary, whether it is not appropriate behavior.