. 2012 Sep 4;39(5):979–992. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbs080

Table 1.

Social Cognition Domains and their Descriptions

Domain	Description	Example of a Prototypical Task
Theory of mind (ToM)	Definition: The ability to interpret an individual’s speech and actions in terms of his or her intentions, knowledge, and beliefsTasks involve inferring mental states from facial expressions or perspective-taking“First-order” ToM: the ability infer what another person is thinking“Second-order” ToM: the ability to infer what one person believes another person is thinking (ie, a “belief about a belief”)	Reading the Mind in the Eyes task ³²: requires that one infer the mental state of a person only by looking at a photograph of the person’s eyes
Social perception	Definition: The ability to understand and appraise social roles, rules, and contextInvolves using verbal and nonverbal cues in order to make inferences about a social situationMay be central to functioning in a social context, ie, facilitating interactions with people in social settings or establishing relationshipsCan involve making critical appraisals, such as judgments of trustworthiness in other people	Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS) ³³: video-taped scenes containing facial expressions, voice intonations, and bodily gestures. After watching each scene, participants were asked to select from two situations (eg, saying a prayer or talking to a lost child) that would prompt the social cues observed
Social knowledge	Definition: Refers to representational templates of social situations or awareness of the roles, rules, expectations, and goals that govern social situations³⁴Can be declarative, comprising facts and abstract concepts (eg, social scripts) or procedural (eg, rules, skills, and strategies) processes³⁵	Situational Feature Recognition Test (SFRT) ³⁶: requires subjects to select appropriate actions from a list of actions associated with a particular social situation (eg, going to a movie), followed by a list of goals
Attributional bias	Definition: Attributional bias/style reflects whether one typically makes inferences about the causes of positive and negative events to internal (personal), external (other person), or situational factorsReferred to in terms of externalizing bias (EB) vs personalizing bias (PB)EB is the tendency to overattribute positive rather than negative events to oneself, and PB is the tendency to attribute negative events to others rather than to situational factors	The Internal, Personal, and Situational Attributions Questionnaire (IPSAQ) ¹⁸: consists of statements describing an incident; the subject is asked to select one of three causes of the incident. Items reflect internal, external, and situational causes
Emotion perception	Definition: Refers to the ability to accurately identify and name emotions of others, primarily by means of facial expressionsEmotions may also be perceived through vocal prosody	The Face Emotion Identification Test (FEIT) ³⁷: uses the Izard/Ekman emotion photographs and asks subjects to circle one of six “basic” emotions displayed (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and shame)
Emotion processing	Definition: Refers to the ability to understand emotions, discriminate between different emotions, and manage emotions and emotional reactions	Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) ³⁸ is part of the MATRICS battery³⁹: is self-administered, performance-based measure, comprising eight tasks. In the widely used Managing Emotions subscale (designed to measure the cognition of emotion regulation) participants must judge actions that are most effective in obtaining a specified emotional outcome for an individual in a story (eg, what a character may do to reduce his or her anger)