Confidence of social judgments is not just error: Individual differences in the structure, stability, and social functions of perceptual confidence

Catterson, Arman Daniel; Naumann, Laura P.; John, Oliver P.

doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2015.06.001

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…The convergence of confidence ratings across tasks provides behavioral evidence for an underlying general confidence factor that lacks domain-specificity. This interpretation is supported by previous findings identifying confidence as a potentially stable, trait-like factor in both perceptual (Navajas et al, 2017;Stankov & Crawford, 1996) and social decision-making (Catterson, Naumann, & John, 2015). Past research comparing confidence judgements across cognitive and perceptual tasks has also found evidence for a general confidence factor that remains robust even after accounting for measures of personality or intelligence (Pallier et al, 2002).…”

Section: Confidence But Not Metacognitive Ability Was Correlated Acsupporting

confidence: 71%

Alexithymia is associated with lower confidence in both perceptual and emotion recognition tasks

Torunsky¹,

Vilares²

2020

Preprint

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Emotions play an important role in everyday decision-making, but emotional awareness can vary greatly between people. Alexithymia, a trait characterized by little or no awareness of one’s emotions, is broadly associated with poor mental health and increased risk of suicide. Alexithymia is fairly common, affecting as much as 10% of people in Western cultures. Understanding how alexithymia relates to decision-making may therefore have wide-reaching impacts on the quality of life for many individuals. We designed and preregistered a study that examined the relationship between alexithymia and decision-making across different task-types. Data were collected from a community sample (N = 123) and participants completed a social, an emotional, and a perceptual decision-making task, as well as a short alexithymia questionnaire. For each task, we considered multiple aspects of the decision-making process, examining participants’ accuracy, confidence, and metacognitive ability (i.e. the ability to retrospectively distinguish between correct and incorrect responses). We found no relationship between alexithymia and performance or metacognitive ability in any task. However, alexithymia was negatively correlated with confidence in both the perceptual and emotional tasks. Furthermore, confidence in one’s decision was strongly, positively correlated across task types, but both accuracy and metacognitive ability showed no relationship between tasks. These results suggest that confidence may be a trait-like, affective component of decision-making, while performance and metacognitive sensitivity appear more task-specific. Furthermore, our results challenge the current limitations of the alexithymia construct, suggesting that alexithymia may have consequences on cognitive processes beyond emotion recognition alone.

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Section: Confidence But Not Metacognitive Ability Was Correlated Acsupporting

confidence: 71%

Alexithymia is associated with lower confidence in both perceptual and emotion recognition tasks

Torunsky¹,

Vilares²

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In contrast to our hypotheses, our data did not reveal lower confidence during facial emotion recognition in the group of symptom-remitted BPD patients in comparison with healthy controls. In general, the remitted BPD subjects’ confidence in their judgments is well justified: they assessed the social cues for many of the experimental conditions in the same manner as healthy participants and were able to adjust their confidence depending on the targets’ features and varying difficulty to judge the intensity of an emotion across different experimental conditions [48]. Nevertheless, the BPD patients also felt confident in their negatively biased judgements when evaluating positive social cues.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A negative bias in decoding positive social cues characterizes emotion processing in patients with symptom-remitted Borderline Personality Disorder

Kleindienst

Hauschild

Liebke

et al. 2019

bord personal disord emot dysregul

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BackgroundImpairments in the domain of interpersonal functioning such as the feeling of loneliness and fear of abandonment have been associated with a negative bias during processing of social cues in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Since these symptoms show low rates of remission, high rates of recurrence and are relatively resistant to treatment, in the present study we investigated whether a negative bias during social cognitive processing exists in BPD even after symptomatic remission. We focused on facial emotion recognition since it is one of the basal social-cognitive processes required for successful social interactions and building relationships.MethodsNinety-eight female participants (46 symptom-remitted BPD [r-BPD]), 52 healthy controls [HC]) rated the intensity of anger and happiness in ambiguous (anger/happiness blends) and unambiguous (emotion/neutral blends) emotional facial expressions. Additionally, participants assessed the confidence they experienced in their own judgments.ResultsR-BPD participants assessed ambiguous expressions as less happy and as more angry when the faces displayed predominantly happiness. Confidence in these judgments did not differ between groups, but confidence in judging happiness in predominantly happy faces was lower in BPD patients with a higher level of BPD psychopathology.ConclusionsEvaluating social cues that signal the willingness to affiliate is characterized by a negative bias that seems to be a trait-like feature of social cognition in BPD. In contrast, confidence in judging positive social signals seems to be a state-like feature of emotion recognition in BPD that improves with attenuation in the level of acute BPD symptoms.

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“…This conclusion is consistent with meta-analytic evidence that narcissism is associated with overconfidence and self-enhancement (Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, & Vohs, 2003; Campbell, Goodie, & Foster, 2004; Grijalva & Zhang, 2016). In a similar study, though, Catterson, Naumann, and John (2015) observed that sense of power (feeling more or less socially powerful) was even more strongly associated with social perceptual confidence than was narcissism. Although the nomological network of self-reported CE ability requires clarification, this self-reported capacity may be more related to overconfidence, social self-esteem, narcissism, or other personality traits than to CE ability, at least as measured by the most commonly used behavioral tasks.…”

mentioning

confidence: 80%

Are self-report cognitive empathy ratings valid proxies for cognitive empathy ability? Negligible meta-analytic relations with behavioral task performance.

Murphy

Lilienfeld

2019

Psychological Assessment

169

144

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Empathy is widely regarded as relevant to a diverse range of psychopathological constructs, such as autism spectrum disorder, psychopathy, and borderline personality disorder. Cognitive empathy (CE) is the ability to accurately recognize or infer the thoughts and feelings of others. Although behavioral task paradigms are frequently used to assess such abilities, a large proportion of published studies reporting on CE use self-report questionnaires. For decades, however, a number of theorists have cautioned that individuals may not possess the metacognitive insight needed to validly gauge their own mindreading abilities. To investigate this possibility, we examined the aggregate relations between behavioral CE task performance and self-report CE scale scores, as well as with self-report affective empathy scale scores for comparison. Meta-analytic results, based on random effects models, from 85 studies (total N ϭ 14,327) indicate that self-report CE scores account for only approximately 1% of the variance in behavioral cognitive empathy assessments and that, perhaps equally importantly, this relation is not significantly different from that demonstrated by affective empathy scores. Effect sizes were not moderated by self-report empathy domain, gender composition, unisensory versus multisensory behavioral stimuli presentation, child versus adult samples, or by normative versus clinical/forensic samples. Effect size estimates were not markedly affected by publication bias. These results raise serious concerns regarding the widespread use of self-report CE scores as proxies for CE ability, as well as the extensive theoretical conclusions that have been based on their use in past studies. Public Significance StatementThe accumulated evidence indicates that self-report questionnaires are not a trustworthy method for assessing an individual's cognitive empathy abilities. Researchers and clinicians should avoid relying upon them, until and unless adequate evidence is produced demonstrating their validity when used for this purpose.

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Confidence of social judgments is not just error: Individual differences in the structure, stability, and social functions of perceptual confidence

Cited by 6 publications

References 46 publications

Alexithymia is associated with lower confidence in both perceptual and emotion recognition tasks

Alexithymia is associated with lower confidence in both perceptual and emotion recognition tasks

A negative bias in decoding positive social cues characterizes emotion processing in patients with symptom-remitted Borderline Personality Disorder

Are self-report cognitive empathy ratings valid proxies for cognitive empathy ability? Negligible meta-analytic relations with behavioral task performance.

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