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Correlations between mean socialness ratings and lexicalsemantic dimensions. Only correlations significant at p < .01 are shown. The strength and direction of the correlation coefficients are indicated by the colour and the numerical values. For each variable of interest, the numbers of items in common with our socialness ratings are as follows: length, concreteness, valence, arousal, and dominance:
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It has been proposed that social experience plays an important role in the grounding of concepts, and socialness has been proffered as a fundamental organisational principle underpinning semantic representation in the human brain. However, the empirical support for these hypotheses is limited by inconsistencies in the way socialness has been define...
Citations
... Social interactions, thus, appear to be one of ACs' learning environment, and the question arises as to how spontaneous conversations use ACs (Borghi & Binkofski, 2014;Dove, 2009Dove, , 2011Dove, , 2014Prinz, 2012). While many studies focused on semantic, emotional, social (Della Rosa et al., 2010;Diveica et al., 2022;Villani et al., 2019), and interoceptive conceptual dimensions (Connell & Lynott, 2012;Villani et al., 2021), more pragmatic dimensions of ACs still need to be explored (for an exception, see Villani et al., 2022). Pragmatic dimensions might offer important insights for accurately selecting stimuli materials in new interactive ecological paradigms. ...
domains of knowledge may have social origins. However, whether abstract concepts (ACs) may also differentially affect communicative interaction and conversation has not been explored. Here, we studied ACs’ communicative functions by collecting in an Italian and an English sample, ratings for concrete concept (CC) and ACs related to three main dimensions: communicative/pragmatic [i.e., Openness to Negotiation (ON), Easiness to Start a Conversation (ESC)], semantic/metacognitive [i.e., Social Metacognition (SM) – perceived need of others, Word Confidence (WC), Contextual Availability (CA)], and emotional–experiential (i.e., Pleasantness, Valence, Familiarity). Overall, Italian participants judged it was easier to start a conversation, the more pleasant, familiar, and positively valenced were rated the concepts. Crucially, at lower values of the emotional–experiential component (i.e., Familiarity in the Italian sample, also Pleasantness and Valence in an English sample), there was an advantage of ACs over CCs in the ESC. Moreover, in the Italian sample, participants rated ACs higher on SM, ON, and lower on WC and CA. Notably, in both the Italian and English sample, ACs with higher ratings on the ESC dimension belonged to the Self-Sociality subcluster. The results offer new insights into the pragmatic aspects linked to ACs’ use.
... For the semantic dimension of socialness, the ratings were validated based on Diveica et al. 3 and Binder et al. 1 . The core ideas of the instructions used in the 3 studies are all centered on interpersonal interactions and relationships. ...
... The core ideas of the instructions used in the 3 studies are all centered on interpersonal interactions and relationships. However, the instructions used in the current study and Binder et al. 1 were both brief, while those used by Diveica et al. 3 were much more detailed, that is, "a social characteristic of a person or group of people, a social behavior or interaction, a social role, a social space, a social institution or system, a social value or ideology, or any other socially relevant concept. " The correlations of our ratings to those of Diveica et al. 3 For the semantic dimension of emotion (valence), the ratings were validated based on Xu et al. 55 and Binder et al. 1 . ...
... However, the instructions used in the current study and Binder et al. 1 were both brief, while those used by Diveica et al. 3 were much more detailed, that is, "a social characteristic of a person or group of people, a social behavior or interaction, a social role, a social space, a social institution or system, a social value or ideology, or any other socially relevant concept. " The correlations of our ratings to those of Diveica et al. 3 For the semantic dimension of emotion (valence), the ratings were validated based on Xu et al. 55 and Binder et al. 1 . The instructions used in the current study and Xu et al. 55 are similar, and the correlation between the two studies is 0.935. ...
Evidence from psychology and cognitive neuroscience indicates that the human brain’s semantic system contains several specific subsystems, each representing a particular dimension of semantic information. Word ratings on these different semantic dimensions can help investigate the behavioral and neural impacts of semantic dimensions on language processes and build computational representations of language meaning according to the semantic space of the human cognitive system. Existing semantic rating databases provide ratings for hundreds to thousands of words, which can hardly support a comprehensive semantic analysis of natural texts or speech. This article reports a large database, the Six Semantic Dimension Database (SSDD), which contains subjective ratings for 17,940 commonly used Chinese words on six major semantic dimensions: vision, motor, socialness, emotion, time, and space. Furthermore, using computational models to learn the mapping relations between subjective ratings and word embeddings, we include the estimated semantic ratings for 1,427,992 Chinese and 1,515,633 English words in the SSDD. The SSDD will aid studies on natural language processing, text analysis, and semantic representation in the brain.
... The superordinate label of 'social concept' is used to refer to many very different types of semantic concept, spanning from very concrete entities such as people, through emotions, to more abstract behaviours and social traits. Consequently, it becomes less clear as to what crucial characteristic(s) (if any) make a concept 'social' 61,153 or whether, like Wittgenstein's famous 'game' concept problem, 154 there is no single defining feature shared by all social concepts. 23 We have proposed that social control depends on prefrontal regions, in particular the orbitofrontal and medial prefrontal cortex (including anterior cingulate cortex). ...
Running title: Impaired social behaviour in frontotemporal dementia Keywords: frontotemporal dementia, semantic dementia, social-semantic knowledge, social control, social behaviour, anterior temporal lobe, orbitofrontal cortex 2 Abbreviations: bvFTD = behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia; SD = semantic dementia; ATL = anterior temporal lobe; OFC = orbitofrontal cortex, ACC = anterior cingulate cortex 3 Abstract Impaired social cognition is a core deficit of frontotemporal dementia (FTD). It is most commonly associated with the behavioural-variant of FTD, with atrophy of the orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. However, social cognitive changes are also common in semantic dementia, with atrophy centred on the anterior temporal lobes. The impairment of social behaviour in FTD has typically been attributed to damage to the orbitofrontal cortex and/or temporal poles and/or the uncinate fasciculus that connects them. However, the relative contribution of each region is unresolved. In this review, we present a unified neurocognitive model of controlled social behaviour that not only explains the observed impairment of social behaviours in FTD, but also assimilates findings from other patient groups, comparative neurology, and normative cognitive neuroscience. We propose that impaired social behaviour results from damage to two cognitively-and anatomically-distinct components. The first component is social-semantic knowledge, supported by the anterior temporal lobes bilaterally. The second component is social control, supported by the orbitofrontal cortex, medial frontal cortex and ventrolateral frontal cortex, which interact with social-semantic knowledge to guide and shape social behaviour. 4
... Consequently, we argue that to further progress theory, the field must first establish a clearer working definition of socialness. To this end, we describe preliminary data from a large-scale rating study in which Diveica et al. [4] provided participants with an inclusive definition of socialness and asked them to collectively rate over 8000 English words. This includes findings that appear to confirm that these ratings capture aspects of word meaning that are distinct from those measured via other semantic variables like concreteness. ...
... We believe this can best be achieved, at least initially, by adopting a broad definition of socialness. To aid this endeavour, we recently obtained ratings for 8388 English words by asking participants to rate socialness according to the following definition [4]: the extent to which each word has social relevance by describing or referring to a social characteristic of a person or group of people (e.g. 'trustworthy'), a social behaviour or interaction (e.g. ...
... As might be expected [23], socialness was positively associated with valence extremity (the absolute difference between the valence rating and the neutral point of the original valence scale [29]), but it shared only 4.8% of variance. We provide more extensive description and exploration of the socialness norms in Diveica et al. [4] but, in summary, our preliminary analyses indicated that this socialness measure captures a distinct psycholinguistic construct. ...
Abstract concepts, like justice and friendship, are central features of our daily lives. Traditionally, abstract concepts are distinguished from other concepts in that they cannot be directly experienced through the senses. As such, they pose a challenge for strongly embodied models of semantic representation that assume a central role for sensorimotor information. There is growing recognition, however, that it is possible for meaning to be ‘grounded’ via cognitive systems, including those involved in processing language and emotion. In this article, we focus on the specific proposal that social significance is a key feature in the representation of some concepts. We begin by reviewing recent evidence in favour of this proposal from the fields of psycholinguistics and neuroimaging. We then discuss the limited extent to which there is consensus about the definition of ‘socialness’ and propose essential next steps for research in this domain. Taking one such step, we describe preliminary data from an unprecedented large-scale rating study that can help determine how socialness is distinct from other facets of word meaning. We provide a backdrop of contemporary theories regarding semantic representation and social cognition and highlight important predictions for both brain and behaviour.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences’.
... A central contribution of affective and emotional information has been stressed (Kousta et al., 2011;Vigliocco et al., 2014), involving brain regions known to be associated with affect processing, such as the cingulate cortex (Vigliocco et al., 2014), and the anterior (Conca, Catricalà, et al., 2021b;Wang et al., 2019) and midposterior temporal areas (Skipper & Olson, 2014). Similar evidence has been reported for further specific dimensions, such as interoception (Connell et al., 2018;Villani et al., 2021), social Diveica et al., 2022) and quantity-related information (Fischer & Shaki, 2014;Shaki & Fischer, 2008), the latter two in turn respectively involving those brain areas associated with social cognition processing, i.e. superior anterior temporal lobe, and with magnitude, i.e. frontoparietal areas) (Catricalà et al., 2020(Catricalà et al., , 2021Conca, Borsa, et al., 2021a;Conca, Catricalà, et al., 2021b;Conca & Tettamanti, 2018). ...
Neuroscience research has provided evidence that semantic information is stored in a distributed brain network involved in sensorimotor and linguistic processing. More specifically, according to the embodied cognition accounts, the representation of concepts is deemed as grounded in our bodily states. For these reasons, normative measures of words should provide relevant information about the extent to which each word embeds perceptual and action properties. In the present study, we collected ratings for 959 Italian nouns and verbs from 398 volunteers, recruited via an online platform. The words were mostly taken from the Italian adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW). A pool of 145 verbs was added to the original set. All the words were rated on 11 sensorimotor dimensions: six perceptual modalities (vision, audition, taste, smell, touch, and interoception) and five effectors (hand-arm, foot-leg, torso, mouth, head). The new verbs were also rated on the ANEW dimensions. Results showed good reliability and consistency with previous studies. Relations between perceptual and motor dimensions are described and interpreted, along with relations between the sensorimotor and the affective dimensions. The currently developed dataset represents an important novelty, as it includes different word classes, i.e., both nouns and verbs, and integrates ratings of both sensorimotor and affective dimensions, along with other psycholinguistic parameters; all features only partially accomplished in previous studies.
... First, the language system is characterised by associations across networks of words (Landauer et al., 1998;Pylyshyn, 1973). For instance, the word 'window' often co-occurs with 'door', whereas 'window' seldom co-occurs with 'sheep'. 1 Second, the embodiment system is characterised by associations within perceptual, motor, affective and social domains (Barsalou, 1999a;Diveica et al., 2022). For instance, reading the words 'green' or 'red' can activate the same areas that activate upon seeing those colours (Simmons et al., 2007). ...
... Further evidence for the contextual dependency of the interplay between language and sensorimotor information was found by Riccardi et al. (2019), who investigated the comprehension of action verbs and abstract verbs in left-hemisphere stroke patients, finding that the processing of action concepts relied more heavily on sensory-motor areas. Furthermore, studies have suggested that even abstract concepts may be partially grounded in modality-specific domains such as emotion, sociality and interoception (Borghi et al., 2022;Conca et al., 2021;Connell et al., 2018;Diveica et al., 2022;Kousta et al., 2011;Vigliocco et al., 2014;X. Wang et al., 2021). ...
... Barca et al., 2020;Duñabeitia et al., 2009;Snefjella & Blank, 2020), emotion(Kousta et al., 2011;Ponari et al., 2020;Ponari, Norbury, Rotaru, et al., 2018;Vigliocco et al., 2014), interoception(Connell et al., 2018) and social information(Borghi et al., 2022(Borghi et al., , 2019Diveica et al., 2022). ...
Research has suggested that conceptual processing depends on both language-based and sensorimotor information. In this thesis, I investigate the nature of these systems and their interplay at three levels of the experimental structure—namely, individuals, words and tasks. In Study 1, I contributed to a multi-lab replication of the object orientation effect, which has been used to test sensorimotor simulation. The effect did not appear across any of the 18 languages examined, and it was not influenced by individual differences in mental rotation. Next, in Study 2, we drew on three existing data sets that implemented semantic priming, semantic decision and lexical decision. We extended these data sets with measures of language-based and vision-based information, and analysed their interactions with participants’ vocabulary size and gender, and with presentation speed. The analysis had a conservative structure of fixed and random effects. First, we found that language-based information was more important than vision-based information. Second, in the semantic priming study—whose task required distinguishing between words and nonwords—, both language-based and vision-based information were more influential when words were presented faster. Third, a ‘task-relevance advantage’ was identified in higher-vocabulary participants. Specifically, in lexical decision, higher-vocabulary participants were more sensitive to language-based information than lower-vocabulary participants, whereas in semantic decision, higher-vocabulary participants were more sensitive to word concreteness. Fourth, we demonstrated the influence of the analytical method on the results. Last, we estimated the sample size required to investigate various effects. We found that 300 participants were sufficient to examine the effect of language-based information in words, whereas more than 1,000 participants were necessary to examine the effect of vision-based information and the interactions of both former variables with vocabulary size, gender and presentation speed. This power analysis suggests that larger sample sizes are necessary to investigate perceptual simulation and individual differences in conceptual processing.
... The extent to which a word's meaning has social relevance on a seven-point Likert scale from 1 (not social) to 7 (highly social) (Diveica et al., 2022). ...
The number of databases that provide various measurements of lexical properties for psycholinguistic research has increased rapidly in recent years. The proliferation of lexical variables, and the multitude of associated databases, makes the choice, comparison, and standardization of these variables in psycholinguistic research increasingly difficult. Here, we introduce The South Carolina Psycholinguistic Metabase (SCOPE), which is a metabase (or a meta-database) containing an extensive, curated collection of psycholinguistic variable values from major databases. The metabase currently contains 245 lexical variables, organized into seven major categories: General (e.g., frequency), Orthographic (e.g., bigram frequency), Phonological (e.g., phonological uniqueness point), Orth-Phon (e.g., consistency), Semantic (e.g., concreteness), Morphological (e.g., number of morphemes), and Response variables (e.g., lexical decision latency). We hope that SCOPE will become a valuable resource for researchers in psycholinguistics and affiliated disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience of language, computational linguistics, and communication disorders. The availability and ease of use of the metabase with comprehensive set of variables can facilitate the understanding of the unique contribution of each of the variables to word processing, and that of interactions between variables, as well as new insights and development of improved models and theories of word processing. It can also help standardize practice in psycholinguistics. We demonstrate use of the metabase by measuring relationships between variables in multiple ways and testing their individual contribution towards a number of dependent measures, in the most comprehensive analysis of this kind to date. The metabase is freely available at go.sc.edu/scope.
Attaching semantic meaning to sensory information received from both inside and outside our bodies is a fundamental function of the human brain. The theory of Controlled Semantic Cognition (CSC) proposes that the formation of semantic knowledge relies on connections between spatially distributed modality-specific spoke-nodes, and a modality-general hub in the anterior temporal lobes (ATLs). This theory can also be applied to social semantic knowledge, though certain domain-specific spoke-nodes may make a disproportionate contribution to the understanding of social concepts. The ATLs have strong connections with spoke-node structures such as the subgenual ACC (sgACC) and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that play an important role in predicting the hedonic value of stimuli. We hypothesized that in addition to the ATL semantic hub, a social semantic task would also require input from hedonic evaluation structures. We used voxel based morphometry (VBM) to examine structural brain-behavior relationships in 152 patients with neurodegeneration (Alzheimer's disease [N = 12], corticobasal syndrome (N = 18], progressive supranuclear palsy [N = 13], behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia [N = 56], and primary progressive aphasia (PPA) [N = 53]) using the Social Interaction Vocabulary Task (SIVT). This task measures the ability to correctly match a social term (e.g. "gossiping") with a visual depiction of that social interaction. As predicted, VBM showed that worse SIVT scores corresponded with volume loss in bilateral ATL semantic hub regions, but also in the sgACC, OFC, caudate and putamen (pFWE <0.05). These results support the CSC model of a hub-and-spoke organization of social semantic knowledge with the ATL as a domain-general semantic hub, and ventromedial and striatal structures as domain specific spoke-nodes. Importantly, these results suggest that correct comprehension of social semantic concepts requires emotional 'tagging' of a concept by the evaluation system, and that the social deficits observed in some neurodegenerative disease syndromes may be caused by the break-down of this mechanism.
Conceptual knowledge is dynamic, fluid, and flexible, changing as a function of contextual factors at multiple scales. The Covid-19 pandemic can be considered a large-scale, global context that has fundamentally altered most people's experiences with the world. It has also introduced a new concept, COVID (or COVID-19), into our collective knowledgebase. What are the implications of this introduction for how existing conceptual knowledge is structured? Our collective emotional and social experiences with the world have been profoundly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and experience-based perspectives on concept representation suggest that emotional and social experiences are critical components of conceptual knowledge. Such changes in collective experience should, then, have downstream consequences on knowledge of emotion- and social-related concepts. Using a naturally occurring dataset derived from the social media platform Twitter, we show that semantic spaces for concepts related to our emotional experiences with Covid-19 (i.e., emotional concepts like FEAR)-but not for unrelated concepts (i.e., animals like CAT)-show quantifiable shifts as a function of the emergence of COVID-19 as a concept and its associated emotional and social experiences, shifts which persist 6 months after the onset of the pandemic. The findings support a dynamic view of conceptual knowledge wherein shared experiences affect conceptual structure.
