Mirroring, Mentalizing, and the Social Neuroscience of Listening

Abstract

Listening to another speak is a basic process in social cognition. In the social neurosciences, there are relatively few studies that directly bear on listening; however, numerous studies have investigated the neural bases of some of the likely constituents of successful listening. In this article, I review some of this work as it relates to listening, with a focus on two auxiliary processes in the comprehension of speech: perceiving the nonverbal behaviors, such as facial expression, that accompany an utterance (i.e., how it is being said); and interpreting an utterance and the nonverbal behaviors that accompany it in terms of the speaker's state of mind (i.e., why it is being said). The review indicates the presence of two large-scale systems in the human brain that play a major role in successful listening: the putative mirror neuron system, which likely facilitates the relatively automatic perception of the how of speech; and the so-called mentalizing system, which likely underlies our ability to actively reach

Executive Functions and Theory of Mind in Teachers and Non-Teachers

“…Regarding expert teachers and their prolonged response time in high-order affective ToM tasks, we hypothesize that, during this type of task, teachers do more than just process the stimulus content and respond. We think that, unlike the control group, expert teachers engage in complex cycles of active-empathic perception [ [96] , [97] , [98] ], which would translate into slower, but better elaborated responses. Following the proposal of Cunningham and Zelazo [ 94 , 95 ], entering into active-empathic perception cycles would increase the number of iterations the system requires to reach a response.…”

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“…When the child is verbal, listening entails more than just paying attention to what is being communicated. Active listening involves two social cognitive processes that take place simultaneously: the listener's perception of non-verbal behaviours that co-occur with the words being spoken, how things are said, and the interpretation that the listener makes of the speaker's state of mind, why things are said (Spunt, 2013). Research suggests that the human brain responds to the sound of voices independently of linguistic content (Latinus & Belin, 2011).…”

“…On the other hand, making sense as to why something is said requires top-down processes, that is, it requires that the listener know something about the context in which the speaker is talking. What is particularly interesting is that understanding how and why someone is saying something is essential to understanding what is being said (Spunt, 2013). This observation is particularly important when young children are involved in the conversation.…”