Social cognition

Socially complex peer play may provide opportunities for children to coordinate perspectives, negotiate roles, and respond to others' needs, but its association with prosocial judgment may differ according to children's social-cognitive resources. This small-scale longitudinal study examined whether mental state knowledge assessed at age 4–5 conditioned the concurrent association between socially complex peer play and prosocial judgment assessed at age 5–6. Participants were 35 children from a private nursery school in Japan. Mental state knowledge was assessed using a false-belief task. At age 5–6, children completed helping and sharing judgment tasks, and their free play was observed naturalistically across repeated focal-child observations. Socially complex peer play was indexed by the combined proportion of associative and cooperative play. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that the interaction between earlier mental state knowledge and socially complex peer play significantly predicted sharing judgment. The corresponding interaction for helping was positive but did not reach the conventional significance threshold. Sensitivity analyses using heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors supported the sharing result. Given the modest sample size, the findings should be interpreted as preliminary. They suggest that the association between socially complex peer play and prosocial judgment may differ according to children's earlier social-cognitive resources.

Introduction Level-2 visual perspective taking (VPT-2) reflects children’s ability to understand others’ visual experiences. However, the effects of viewing angle and task materials on 4-year-olds’ performance remain unclear. Methods Using a picture-taking (“photographer”) task, this study examined the effects of test tool and rotation angle, as well as egocentric error patterns, among 163 four-year-old children from Hainan, China. A 2 (test tool: Lego figurines vs. geometric solids) × 3 (rotation angle: 0°, 90°, 180°) within-subjects design was used. The formal test comprised 18 four-alternative trials, with three trials in each Tool × Angle condition; each correct response scored 1 and each incorrect response scored 0. Performance was assessed using raw correct scores and the proportions of egocentric errors. Results Rotation angle significantly affected performance in a nonmonotonic pattern: raw correct scores were highest at 0°, followed by 180°, and lowest at 90°. The main effect of test tool was significant, with higher raw correct scores in the Lego figurine condition than in the geometric solids condition. The Tool × Angle interaction for raw correct scores was not significant. The proportions of egocentric errors showed significant main effects of test tool and rotation angle, as well as a significant Tool × Angle interaction. Egocentric errors were most pronounced in the geometric solids condition at 180°. Supplementary analyses revealed no significant sex main effect or sex-related interactions. Discussion These findings indicate that 4-year-olds’ VPT-2 performance varies across rotation angles and test materials. Performance differences between material conditions may be associated with differences in task structure, stimulus discriminability, social cues, and spatial-relational judgment demands, whose independent contributions could not be isolated in this study. Because the analyses relied on raw correct scores and error-type data, the findings should be interpreted as differences in behavioral performance rather than direct evidence about processing strategies or cognitive mechanisms.

Understanding how individuals evaluate social content in affective scenes is crucial for research in emotion, social cognition, and decision-making. However, standardized image databases often lack fine-grained ratings of social dimensions beyond basic emotional content. We present a normative dataset of 296 affective scenes rated by 424 adult participants across six social-affective dimensions: social relevance, emotion sharing, action sharing, interpersonal equality, scene pleasantness, and participatory arousal. Each image was independently coded for objective features such as number of people, face visibility, and gaze direction. All rating dimensions showed excellent interrater reliability. Pleasantness ratings demonstrated strong convergent validity with established valence norms from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), while arousal ratings differentiated between experienced and participatory arousal, suggesting that the latter captures a distinct affective component. Correlation analyses revealed that social relevance was strongly associated with scene pleasantness and a composite “engagement” factor combining emotion sharing, action sharing, and equality. Notably, the association between pleasantness and social relevance was especially pronounced in scenes depicting single individuals. Linear mixed models further indicated that extraversion showed a tentative positive association with the engagement–social relevance relationship, which did not survive correction for multiple comparisons and requires replication. Other personality traits and empathy did not significantly moderate these relationships. This open-access dataset provides a reliable, multidimensional tool for selecting affective scenes based on both emotional and social-interpersonal features. It supports improved stimulus control and design in a wide range of behavioral and neurocognitive research. By systematically mapping social meaning in static affective scenes, our study advances existing methodological resources and offers empirical insight into the structure of social-affective appraisals. All image codes, mean ratings, and analysis scripts are publicly available via the Open Science Framework.

درک نحوه ارزیابی افراد از محتوای اجتماعی در صحنه‌های عاطفی برای پژوهش در حوزه هیجان، شناخت اجتماعی و تصمیم‌گیری اهمیت اساسی دارد. با این حال، پایگاه‌های داده تصویری استاندارد اغلب فاقد ارزیابی‌های دقیق ابعاد اجتماعی فراتر از محتوای عاطفی پایه هستند. در این پژوهش، مجموعه داده هنجاری شامل ۲۹۶ صحنه عاطفی ارائه می‌شود که توسط ۴۲۴ شرکت‌کننده بزرگسال در شش بعد اجتماعی-عاطفی ارزیابی شده‌اند: ارتباط اجتماعی، اشتراک هیجان، اشتراک عمل، برابری بین‌فردی، خوشایندی صحنه و برانگیختگی مشارکتی. هر تصویر به طور مستقل از نظر ویژگی‌های عینی مانند تعداد افراد، قابلیت مشاهده چهره و جهت نگاه کدگذاری شده است. تمامی ابعاد ارزیابی، پایایی بین ارزیاب بسیار عالی نشان دادند. ارزیابی‌های خوشایندی، روایی همگرا قوی با هنجارهای ارزش‌گذاری تثبیت‌شده از سامانه بین‌المللی تصاویر عاطفی (IAPS) داشتند، در حالی که ارزیابی‌های برانگیختگی بین برانگیختگی تجربه‌شده و مشارکتی تمایز قائل شدند که نشان می‌دهد برانگیختگی مشارکتی مؤلفه عاطفی متمایزی را منعکس می‌کند. تحلیل‌های همبستگی نشان داد که ارتباط اجتماعی با خوشایندی صحنه و عامل ترکیبی «درگیری» (شامل اشتراک هیجان، اشتراک عمل و برابری) ارتباط قوی دارد. به طور قابل توجهی، این ارتباط میان خوشایندی و ارتباط اجتماعی در صحنه‌هایی که تنها یک فرد را نشان می‌دهند، برجسته‌تر بود. مدل‌های خطی آمیخته همچنین نشان دادند که برون‌گرایی ارتباط مثبت و اولیه‌ای با رابطه درگیری–ارتباط اجتماعی دارد که پس از اصلاح برای مقایسه‌های متعدد معنادار باقی نماند و نیازمند تکرار است. سایر صفات شخصیتی و همدلی به طور معناداری این روابط را تعدیل نکردند. این مجموعه داده دسترسی آزاد، ابزاری پایا و چندبعدی برای انتخاب صحنه‌های عاطفی بر اساس ویژگی‌های هیجانی و اجتماعی-بین‌فردی فراهم می‌کند. این مجموعه از کنترل و طراحی بهتر محرک‌ها در طیف وسیعی از پژوهش‌های رفتاری و عصب‌شناختی حمایت می‌کند. با ترسیم نظام‌مند معنای اجتماعی در صحنه‌های عاطفی ایستا، مطالعه حاضر منابع روش‌شناختی موجود را ارتقا داده و بینش تجربی درباره ساختار ارزیابی‌های اجتماعی-عاطفی ارائه می‌دهد. تمامی کدهای تصاویر، میانگین ارزیابی‌ها و اسکریپت‌های تحلیل از طریق Open Science Framework به صورت عمومی در دسترس است.