No abstract

The workup of children with hearing loss can be guided by the recommendations provided herein.

Humans rely on social interaction to achieve many important goals. These interactions rely on people’s capacity to understand others’ mental states: their thoughts and feelings. Do different cultures realize this ability in different ways, or do universal principles describe how all peoples understand mental states? Here we investigated mental state representation in 57 countries, 17 languages, and 4 historical societies. We quantified mental state meaning by analyzing large bodies of text produced by each culture. We then tested whether a theory of mental state representation – the 3d Mind Model – could explain which mental states were similar within each culture. The model explained mental state representation in all studied cultures, indicating that universal principles describe how people understand other minds.

Humans rely on social interaction to achieve many important goals. These interactions rely in turn on people's capacity to understand others' mental states: their thoughts and feelings. Do different cultures understand minds in different ways, or do widely shared principles describe how different cultures understand mental states? Extensive data suggest that the mind organizes mental state concepts using the 3d Mind Model, composed of the psychological dimensions: rationality (vs. emotionality), social impact (states which affect others more vs. less), and valence (positive vs. negative states). However, this evidence comes primarily from Englishspeaking individuals in the United States. Here we investigated mental state representation in 57 contemporary countries, using 163 million English language tweets; in 17 languages, using billions of words of text from internet webpages; and across more than 2000 years of history, using curated texts from four historical societies. We quantified mental state meaning by analyzing the text produced by each culture using word embeddings. We then tested whether the 3d Mind Model could explain which mental states were similar in meaning within each culture.We found that the 3d Mind Model significantly explained mental state meaning in every country, language, and historical society that we examined. These results suggest that rationality, social impact, and valence form a generalizable conceptual backbone for mental state representation.

No abstract