Formalising social representation to explain psychiatric symptoms

Trends Cogn Sci. 2023 Mar;27(3):317-332. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2022.12.004. Epub 2023 Jan 4.

Abstract

Recent work in social cognition has moved beyond a focus on how people process social rewards to examine how healthy people represent other agents and how this is altered in psychiatric disorders. However, formal modelling of social representation has not kept pace with these changes, impeding our understanding of how core aspects of social cognition function, and fail, in psychopathology. Here, we suggest that belief-based computational models provide a basis for an integrated sociocognitive approach to psychiatry, with the potential to address important but unexamined pathologies of social representation, such as maladaptive schemas and illusory social agents.

Keywords: Bayesian-belief; game theory; psychiatry; recursive beliefs; schema; social representation; social-value functions.

Publication types

  • Review
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adaptation, Psychological
  • Humans
  • Mental Disorders*