Understanding others
Mental states: Knowledge, beliefs, feelings, intentions, and desires.
Mentalizing: The process of inferring or attributing mental states to others.
Empathy: In the broadest sense, an emotional reaction to another person’s feelings.
Perspective taking: Putting oneself in someone else’s situation.
False belief: A belief that does not correspond to current reality.
Personal distress: A feeling of distress in response to another person’s distress or plight.
Pity: A concern about someone else’s situation.
Sympathy: A feeling of compassion or concern for another person.
Chameleon Effect: Spontaneous mimicry of gestures during positive interpersonal
exchanges.
Anthropomorphism: The attribution of human characteristics to non-human animals,
objects, or other concepts.
Attribution: In social psychology, the process of inferring the causes of people’s behavior.
Intentional stance: The tendency to explain or predict the behavior of others using
intentional states (e.g. wanting, liking etc.)
First-order intentionality: An agent possesses beliefs and desires, but not beliefs about
beliefs.
Second-order intentionality: An agent possesses beliefs about other people’s beliefs.
Theory-theory: The idea that we store, as explicit knowledge, a set of principles relating to
mental states and how these states govern behavior.
Schema: An organized cluster of different information.
Semantic dementia: A neurological condition associated with progressive deterioration in
the meaning of objects and words.
Autism: A developmental condition associated with persistent deficits in social
communication and social interaction across multiple contexts.
Asperger’s syndrome: A subtype of autism associated with less profound non-social
impairments.
Alexithymia: Problems in labeling one’s own feelings.
Executive functions: Control processes that are needed to coordinate the operation of
more specialized components of the brain.
Mu waves: EEG oscillations at a particular frequency (8-13 Hz) that are greatest when
participants are at rest.
Mu suppression: The tendency for fewer mu waves (in EEG) to be present during the
execution of an action.
Broken mirror theory: An account of autism in which the social difficulties are considered
as a consequence of mirror system dysfunction.
Interacting with others
Dyadic interactions: Face-to-face interactions.
Altruism: Helping behavior that is considered ‘selfless’, in that no personal gain is obtained.
Trust: The belief that others will behave fairly towards us.
Freeloaders: People who receive the benefits of cooperation but do not contribute to the
group themselves.
Altruistic punishment: An act of punishment that has no direct benefit to the punisher but
comes at a cost to the punisher.
Kin selection: The theory that we help others who are related to us.
Reciprocal altruism: The notion that we provide help to others in order to obtain help from
, others in the future.
Sexual selection: The presence of a trait is selected for during evolution because it attracts
mating partners.
Indirect reciprocity: Helping others who may never be met again (e.g. for reputation
enhancement).
Empathy-altruism model: The theory that the motivation to help is based on empathic
concern for others.
Game theory: A type of mathematical model that captures how an individual’s success in
making decisions is influenced by the decisions of others.
Neuro-economics: Explains, using neural mechanisms, how individuals and groups make
economic decisions such as assigning value to competing choices, exchange and
reciprocity, and making best use of limited resources.
Prisoner’s Dilemma: A two-player game in which the best individual strategy is non-
cooperation, but the best collective strategy is cooperation.
Payoff matrix: In game theory, a matrix that lists the costs and benefits to each player
based on the different independent decision options.
Ultimatum Game: A two-player game with a proposer and a responder: the proposer is
given a pot of money and must decide what proportion of that money to give to the
responder; the responder can accept or reject the offer.
Public Goods Game: A multiplayer game in which people may choose to contribute
different amounts to a common pot of money, but everybody receives the same benefits
irrespective of what they put in.
Trust Game: A two-player game with a trustee and investor; the investor decides how much
money to invest and the trustee decides how much to return.
Relationships
Social bonds: Hypothetical links between known people that induce a sense of happiness
or well-being in the presence of the bonded other and a sense of wanting or longing
(perhaps even distress) in their absence.
Love: The emotion that is associated with being in an attachment relationship.
Triangular theory of love: An explanation of love in terms of a combination of three factors:
passion, intimacy, and commitment.
Matching hypothesis: States that people are more likely to form long-standing relationships
with those who are as equally physically attractive as they are.
Oxytocin: A hormone involved in attachment formation that acts on certain receptors in the
brain.
Vasopressin: A similar attachment-forming hormone to oxytocin for which males have
greater sensitivity than females.
Attachment: A powerful type of social bond that tends to be limited to particular kinds of
relationships.
Imprinting: The process by which animals recognize and seek proximity with a mother
figure.
Medial Preoptic Area (MPOA): A region of the hypothalamus that, in many mammalian
species, triggers parental behaviors by responding to pregnancy-related hormonal changes.
Strange Situation Test: A measure of attachment during infancy in which the infant
experiences separations and reunions with a stranger and with an attachment figure.
Securely attached: A type of attachment characterized by proximity seeking with the
attachment figure and distress at separation.
Mental states: Knowledge, beliefs, feelings, intentions, and desires.
Mentalizing: The process of inferring or attributing mental states to others.
Empathy: In the broadest sense, an emotional reaction to another person’s feelings.
Perspective taking: Putting oneself in someone else’s situation.
False belief: A belief that does not correspond to current reality.
Personal distress: A feeling of distress in response to another person’s distress or plight.
Pity: A concern about someone else’s situation.
Sympathy: A feeling of compassion or concern for another person.
Chameleon Effect: Spontaneous mimicry of gestures during positive interpersonal
exchanges.
Anthropomorphism: The attribution of human characteristics to non-human animals,
objects, or other concepts.
Attribution: In social psychology, the process of inferring the causes of people’s behavior.
Intentional stance: The tendency to explain or predict the behavior of others using
intentional states (e.g. wanting, liking etc.)
First-order intentionality: An agent possesses beliefs and desires, but not beliefs about
beliefs.
Second-order intentionality: An agent possesses beliefs about other people’s beliefs.
Theory-theory: The idea that we store, as explicit knowledge, a set of principles relating to
mental states and how these states govern behavior.
Schema: An organized cluster of different information.
Semantic dementia: A neurological condition associated with progressive deterioration in
the meaning of objects and words.
Autism: A developmental condition associated with persistent deficits in social
communication and social interaction across multiple contexts.
Asperger’s syndrome: A subtype of autism associated with less profound non-social
impairments.
Alexithymia: Problems in labeling one’s own feelings.
Executive functions: Control processes that are needed to coordinate the operation of
more specialized components of the brain.
Mu waves: EEG oscillations at a particular frequency (8-13 Hz) that are greatest when
participants are at rest.
Mu suppression: The tendency for fewer mu waves (in EEG) to be present during the
execution of an action.
Broken mirror theory: An account of autism in which the social difficulties are considered
as a consequence of mirror system dysfunction.
Interacting with others
Dyadic interactions: Face-to-face interactions.
Altruism: Helping behavior that is considered ‘selfless’, in that no personal gain is obtained.
Trust: The belief that others will behave fairly towards us.
Freeloaders: People who receive the benefits of cooperation but do not contribute to the
group themselves.
Altruistic punishment: An act of punishment that has no direct benefit to the punisher but
comes at a cost to the punisher.
Kin selection: The theory that we help others who are related to us.
Reciprocal altruism: The notion that we provide help to others in order to obtain help from
, others in the future.
Sexual selection: The presence of a trait is selected for during evolution because it attracts
mating partners.
Indirect reciprocity: Helping others who may never be met again (e.g. for reputation
enhancement).
Empathy-altruism model: The theory that the motivation to help is based on empathic
concern for others.
Game theory: A type of mathematical model that captures how an individual’s success in
making decisions is influenced by the decisions of others.
Neuro-economics: Explains, using neural mechanisms, how individuals and groups make
economic decisions such as assigning value to competing choices, exchange and
reciprocity, and making best use of limited resources.
Prisoner’s Dilemma: A two-player game in which the best individual strategy is non-
cooperation, but the best collective strategy is cooperation.
Payoff matrix: In game theory, a matrix that lists the costs and benefits to each player
based on the different independent decision options.
Ultimatum Game: A two-player game with a proposer and a responder: the proposer is
given a pot of money and must decide what proportion of that money to give to the
responder; the responder can accept or reject the offer.
Public Goods Game: A multiplayer game in which people may choose to contribute
different amounts to a common pot of money, but everybody receives the same benefits
irrespective of what they put in.
Trust Game: A two-player game with a trustee and investor; the investor decides how much
money to invest and the trustee decides how much to return.
Relationships
Social bonds: Hypothetical links between known people that induce a sense of happiness
or well-being in the presence of the bonded other and a sense of wanting or longing
(perhaps even distress) in their absence.
Love: The emotion that is associated with being in an attachment relationship.
Triangular theory of love: An explanation of love in terms of a combination of three factors:
passion, intimacy, and commitment.
Matching hypothesis: States that people are more likely to form long-standing relationships
with those who are as equally physically attractive as they are.
Oxytocin: A hormone involved in attachment formation that acts on certain receptors in the
brain.
Vasopressin: A similar attachment-forming hormone to oxytocin for which males have
greater sensitivity than females.
Attachment: A powerful type of social bond that tends to be limited to particular kinds of
relationships.
Imprinting: The process by which animals recognize and seek proximity with a mother
figure.
Medial Preoptic Area (MPOA): A region of the hypothalamus that, in many mammalian
species, triggers parental behaviors by responding to pregnancy-related hormonal changes.
Strange Situation Test: A measure of attachment during infancy in which the infant
experiences separations and reunions with a stranger and with an attachment figure.
Securely attached: A type of attachment characterized by proximity seeking with the
attachment figure and distress at separation.
