Behavior-Reading versus Mentalizing in Animals

The Use of “Literary Fiction” to Promote Mentalizing Ability

Empathy is a multidimensional process that incorporates both mentalizing and emotional sharing dimensions. Empathic competencies are important for creating interpersonal relationships with other people and developing adequate social behaviour. The lack of these social components also leads to isolation and exclusion in healthy populations. However, few studies have investigated how to improve t...

How interpersonal power affects empathic accuracy: differential roles of mentalizing vs. mirroring?

Empathic accuracy (EA)-the correct assessment of the affective states and thoughts of a social partner-affects social behavior and the outcome of interpersonal interactions. Growing evidence has shown that interpersonal power of a perceiver affects EA when assessing a target. This picture, however, is not obvious; there is evidence supporting both the idea that power can improve EA or impair it...

Oxytocin improves mentalizing - pronounced effects for individuals with attenuated ability to empathize.

The ability to predict the behavior of others based on their mental states is crucial for social functioning. Previous studies have provided evidence for the role of Oxytocin (OXT) in enhancing the ability to mentalize. It has also been demonstrated that the effect of OXT seems to strongly depend on socio-cognitive skills with more pronounced effects in individuals with lower socio-cognitive sk...

Computer Assisted Reading (CAR) versus Traditional Print Format in EFL Academic Reading Comprehension

Differentiating Self-Projection from Simulation during Mentalizing: Evidence from fMRI

We asked participants to predict which of two colors a similar other (student) and a dissimilar other (retiree) likes better. We manipulated if color-pairs were two hues from the same color-category (e.g. green) or two conceptually different colors (e.g. green versus blue). In the former case, the mental state that has to be represented (i.e., the percept of two different hues of green) is pred...