Anne Böckler

University of Wuerzburg | JMU

Background: Previous qualitative studies on attitudes towards schistosomiasis demonstrated inconclusive results on the extent of stigma towards schistosomiasis in endemic communities around the world. The Explanatory Model Interview Catalogue-Community Stigma Scale (EMIC-CSS) has been used and validated for the assessment of public stigma across n...

The human brain supports social cognitive functions, including Theory of Mind, empathy, and compassion, through its intrinsic hierarchical organization. However, it remains unclear how the learning and refinement of social skills shapes brain function and structure. We studied if different types of social mental training induce changes in cortical...

The human brain supports social cognitive functions, including Theory of Mind, empathy, and compassion, through its intrinsic hierarchical organization. However, it remains unclear how the learning and refinement of social skills shapes brain function and structure. We studied if different types of social mental training induce changes in cortical...

The human brain supports social cognitive functions, including Theory of Mind, empathy, and compassion, through its intrinsic hierarchical organization. However, it remains unclear how the learning and refinement of social skills shapes brain function and structure. We studied if different types of social mental training induce changes in cortical...

The human brain supports social cognitive functions, including Theory of Mind, empathy, and compassion, through its intrinsic hierarchical organization. However, it remains unclear how the learning and refinement of social skills shapes brain function and structure. We studied if different types of social mental training induce changes in cortical...

In a world with rapidly increasing population that competes for the earth’s limited resources, cooperation is crucial. While research showed that empathizing with another individual in need enhances prosociality, it remains unclear whether correctly inferring the other’s inner, mental states on a more cognitive level (i.e., mentalizing) elicits hel...

Efficient decoding of facial expressions and gaze direction supports reactions to social environments. Although both cues are processed fast and accurately, when and how these cues are integrated is still debated. We investigated the temporal integration of gaze and emotion cues. Participants responded to letters that were randomly presented on fou...

Through the long-term activation of sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, chronic psychosocial stress can compromise mental and bodily health. Psychosocial stress is determined by the perception of social interactions as ego-threatening, and thus strongly influenced by individual social processing capacities. In the cu...

Gaze direction and emotion expression are salient facial features that facilitate social interactions. Previous studies addressed how gaze direction influences the evaluation and recognition of emotion expressions, but few have tested how emotion expression influences attentional processing of direct versus averted gaze faces. The present study exa...

Music is a human universal and has the ability to evoke powerful, genuine emotions. But does music influence our capacity to understand and feel with others? A growing body of evidence indicates that empathy (sharing another's feelings) and compassion (a feeling of concern toward others) are behaviorally and neutrally distinct, both from each other...

Overimitation is hypothesized to foster the spread of conventional information within populations. The current study tested this claim by assigning 5-year-old children (N = 64) to one of two study populations based on their overimitation (overimitators [OIs] vs. non-overimitators [non-OIs]). Children were presented with conventional information in...

Eye contact is a dynamic social signal that captures attention and plays a critical role in human communication. In particular, direct gaze often accompanies communicative acts in an ostensive function: a speaker directs her gaze towards the addressee to highlight the fact that this message is being intentionally communicated to her. The addressee,...

Recent decades have witnessed an increasing interest in effects of meditation-based interventions on the improvement of cognitive abilities, ranging from perceptual discrimination to metacognition. However, intervention studies face numerous conceptual and methodological challenges, and results are fairly inconsistent. In a large-scale 9-month ment...

Human attention is strongly attracted by direct gaze and sudden onset motion. The sudden direct-gaze effect refers to the processing advantage for targets appearing on peripheral faces that suddenly establish eye contact. Here, we investigate the necessity of social information for attention capture by (sudden onset) ostensive cues. Six experiments...

Empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) are two core components of social understanding. The EmpaToM is a validated social video task that allows for independent manipulation and assessment of the two capacities. First applications revealed that empathy and ToM are dissociable constructs on a neuronal as well as on a behavioral level. As the EmpaToM has b...

Social exclusion, even from minimal game-based interactions, induces negative consequences. We investigated whether the nature of the relationship with the excluder modulates the effects of ostracism. Participants played a virtual ball-tossing game with a stranger and a friend (friend condition) or a stranger and their romantic partner (partner con...

Eye gaze is a fundamental element of social interaction. We investigated the role of gaze direction during video conversations between friends, colleagues or strangers. Participants watched short video cuts of a target person engaging in direct gaze, averted gaze or a mixture of both (gaze direction) while listening to another, invisible, person re...

Gaze control is an important component of social communication, e.g. to direct someone’s attention. While previous research on gaze interaction has mainly focused on the gaze recipient by asking how humans respond to perceived gaze (gaze cueing), we address the actor’s point of view by asking how actors control their own eye movements to trigger a...

A bstract Despite the importance of our ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of others, the social brain remains incompletely understood. Here, we studied the plasticity of social brain function in healthy adults following the targeted training of attention-mindfulness, socio-affective, and socio-cognitive skills for 9 months. All partic...

Human eye gaze conveys an enormous amount of socially relevant information, and the rapid assessment of gaze direction is of particular relevance in order to adapt behavior accordingly. Specifically, previous research demonstrated evidence for an advantage of processing direct (vs. averted) gaze. The present study examined discrimination performanc...

The present research shows effects of observed vertical head orientation of another person on numerical cognition in the observer. Participants saw portrait-like photographs of persons from a frontal view with gaze being directed at the camera and the head being tilted up or down (vs. not tilted). The photograph appeared immediately before each tri...

Purpose of Review This article provides an overview of current findings on Theory of Mind (ToM) in human children and adults and highlights the relationship between task specifications and their outcome in socio-cognitive research. Recent Findings ToM, the capacity to reason about and infer others’ mental states, develops progressively throughout...

In contrast to conventional functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis across participants, item analysis allows generalizing the observed neural response patterns from a specific stimulus set to the entire population of stimuli. In the present study, we perform an item analysis on an fMRI paradigm (EmpaToM) that measures the neural corr...

Mindfulness-and, more generally, meditation-based interventions increasingly gain popularity, effectively promoting cognitive, affective, and social capacities. It is unclear, however, if different types of practice have the same or specific effects on mental functioning. Here we tested three consecutive three-month training modules aimed at cultiv...

Background: Most mental disorders are associated with impairments in social functioning. Paradigms developed to study social functioning in laboratory settings mostly put participants in a detached observer point of view. However, some phenomena are inherently interactive and studying full-blown reciprocal interactions may be indispensable to under...

Menschen sind Meister der sozialen Interaktion: Wir kommunizieren und kooperieren mit Leichtigkeit und schaffen gemeinsam, was alleine unmöglich wäre. Dafür ist es unabdingbar, sich in andere hineinzuversetzen. Was denkt, weiß, will unser Gegenüber? Dieses Erschließen der mentalen Zustände anderer Menschen wird als Theory of Mind bezeichnet. Doch w...

Effect-based accounts of human action control have recently highlighted the possibility of representing one’s own actions in terms of anticipated changes in the behavior of social interaction partners. In contrast to action effects that pertain to the agent’s body or the agent’s physical environment, social action effects have been proposed to come...

In order to accomplish the benefits and overcome the difficulties associated with group living, societies critically depend on prosocial behaviors of their members. With various disciplines exploring the preconditions and constraints of altruism and cooperation, psychological research is concerned with the motivations that underlie human prosociali...

Global challenges such as climate change or the refugee crises emphasize the necessity of altruism and cooperation. In a large-scale 9-month intervention study, we investigated the malleability of prosociality by three distinct mental trainings cultivating attention, socio-affective, or socio-cognitive skills. We assessed numerous established measu...

Introduction: Self-referential processing is a key component of the emotional self-concept. Previous studies have shown that emotional self-referential processing is related to structure and function of cortical midline areas such as medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and that it can be altered on a behavioral level by specific mental training practi...

The direction of gaze towards or away from an observer has immediate effects on attentional processing in the observer. Previous research indicates that faces with direct gaze are processed more efficiently than faces with averted gaze. We recently reported additional processing advantages for faces that suddenly adopt direct gaze (abruptly shift f...

Although neuroscientific research has revealed experience-dependent brain changes across the life span in sensory,motor, and cognitive domains, plasticity relating to social capacities remains largely unknown. To investigate whetherthe targeted mental training of different cognitive and social skills can induce specific changes in brain morphology,...

In a recent publication, we employed factor analyses to integrate 14 measures of prosocial behavior, proposing four subcomponents of human prosociality: altruistically motivated, norm motivated, strategically motivated, and self-reported prosocial behavior. However, the reported confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) yielded standardized regression wei...

Although neuroscientific research has revealed experience-dependent brain changes across the life span in sensory, motor, and cognitive domains, plasticity relating to social capacities remains largely unknown. To investigate whether the targeted mental training of different cognitive and social skills can induce specific changes in brain morpholog...

Mindfulness- and, more generally, meditation-based interventions increasingly gain popularity, effectively promoting cognitive, affective, and social capacities. It is unclear, however, if different types of practice have the same or specific effects on mental functioning. Here we tested three consecutive three-month training modules aimed at culti...

Understanding others’ feelings, intentions, and beliefs is a crucial social skill both for our personal lives and for meeting the challenges of a globalized world. Recent evidence suggests that the ability to represent and infer others’ mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM) can be enhanced by mental training in healthy adults. The present study inves...

In a large-scale longitudinal mental training study, we examined whether learning different contemplative practices can change the emotional content of people’s self-concept as assessed through emotional word use in the Twenty Statement Test. During three 3-month training modules, participants learned distinct practices targeting attentional, socio...

Narcissism can lead to various interpersonal problems. However, the characteristics of social decision making in trait narcissism and the cognitive and affective underpinnings are poorly understood. We employed established game theoretical paradigms to investigate different facets of social behavior in participants (N = 122; 41 female, mean age = 3...

This chapter provides a comparative perspective on coordination, exploring whether common solutions to particular coordination problems-such as moving in a group, distributing tasks, coordinating actions in time, and transmitting information-exist across different species. The study of coordination tries to understand how individuals in a cooperati...

Effective gaze control in traffic, based on peripheral visual information, is important to avoid hazards. Whereas previous hazard perception research mainly focused on skill-component development (e.g., orientation and hazard processing), little is known about the role and dynamics of peripheral vision in hazard perception. We analyzed eye movement...

One important aspect of metacognition is the ability to accurately evaluate one’s performance. People vary widely in their metacognitive ability and in general are too confident when evaluating their performance. This often leads to poor decision making with potentially disastrous consequences. To further our understanding of the neural underpinnin...

Our various daily activities continually require regulation of our internal state. These regulatory processes covary with changes in High Frequency Heart Rate Variability (HF-HRV), a marker of parasympathetic activity. Specifically, incidental increases in HF-HRV accompany positive social engagement behavior and prosocial action. Little is known ab...

Although the processes that underlie sharing others' emotions (empathy) and understanding others' mental states (mentalizing, Theory of Mind) have received increasing attention, it is yet unclear how they relate to each other. For instance, are people who strongly empathize with others also more proficient in mentalizing? And (how) do the neural ne...

Unlabelled: Altruistic behavior varies considerably across people and decision contexts. The relevant computational and motivational mechanisms that underlie its heterogeneity, however, are poorly understood. Using a charitable giving task together with multivariate decoding techniques, we identified three distinct psychological mechanisms underly...

Humans have the ability to reflect upon their perception, thoughts, and actions, known as metacognition (MC). The brain basis of MC is incompletely understood, and it is debated whether MC on different processes is subserved by common or divergent networks. We combined behavioral phenotyping with multi-modal neuroimaging to investigate whether stru...

Prosocial behavior is crucial for functioning societies. However, its reliable scientific assessment and the understanding of its underlying structure are still a challenge. We integrated 14 paradigms from diverse disciplines to identify reliable and method-independent subcomponents of human prosociality; 329 participants performed game theoretical...

Most instances of social interaction provide a wealth of information about the states of other people, be it sensations, feelings, thoughts, or convictions. How we represent these states has been a major question in social neuroscience, leading to the identification of two routes to understanding others: an affective route for the direct sharing of...

Functional neuroimaging studies have suggested the existence of 2 largely distinct social cognition networks, one for theory of mind (taking others' cognitive perspective) and another for empathy (sharing others' affective states). To address whether these networks can also be dissociated at the level of brain structure, we combined behavioral phen...

Humans are highly sensitive to directional gaze cues and rapidly shift attention in accordance with others' gaze (i.e., gaze following). Besides providing information about the physical environment, for instance the location of an object, gaze direction can be used to extract information about the social environment, such as whether or not two peop...

Observing eye contact between others enhances the tendency to subsequently follow their gaze and has been suggested to function as a social signal that adds meaning to an upcoming action or event. The present study investigated effects of observed eye contact in high-functioning autism (HFA). Two faces on a screen either looked at or away from each...

Direct eye contact and motion onset are two powerful cues that capture attention. In the present study, we combined direct gaze with the sudden onset of motion to determine whether these cues have independent or shared influences. Participants identified targets presented randomly on one of four faces. Initially, two faces depicted direct gaze, and...

Social exclusion results in lowered satisfaction of basic needs and shapes behavior in subsequent social situations. We investigated participants’ immediate behavioral response during exclusion from an interaction that consisted of establishing eye contact. A newly developed eye-tracker-based “looking game” was employed; participants exchanged look...

People’s sensitivity to eye contact is striking. Studies have revealed that direct eye gaze (faces looking at the participant) is a powerful cue which affects subsequent attentional and cognitive processing. For example, target detection is more efficient close to the location of direct gaze relative to other locations in the environment. Although...

Previous research suggests that people, when interacting with another agent, are sensitive to the other’s visual perspective on the scene. The present study investigated how spontaneously another’s different spatial perspective is taken into account and how this affects the processing of jointly attended stimuli. Participants viewed upright or inve...

When acting and attending together, we take each other's perceptual and intentional relations to the environment into account. The present study investigated whether people are also sensitive to a co-actor's attentional relation to jointly attended events. Two participants sat next to each other and performed a two-choice Navon task, responding to...

Coactors take into account certain aspects of each other's tasks even when this is not required to perform their own task. The present experiments investigated whether the way a coactor allocates attention affects one's own attentional relation to stimuli that are attended jointly (Experiment 1), individually (Experiment 2), or in parallel (Experim...

Accessory signals that precede stimuli in interference tasks lead to faster overall responses while conflict increases. Two opposing accounts exist for the latter finding: one is based on dual-route frameworks of response preparation and proposes amplification of both direct response activation and indirect response selection processes; the other r...

Humans' tendency to follow others' gaze is considered to be rather resistant to top-down influences. However, recent evidence indicates that gaze following depends on prior eye contact with the observed agent. Does observing two people engaging in eye contact also modulate gaze following? Participants observed two faces looking at each other or awa...

When playing a computer ball-tossing game with virtual partners, people react very sensitively to being ostracized (this is, excluded from the game by their interaction partners). Particularly, it has been shown that being ostracized in these games lowers people‟s self- esteem, feeling of belongingness, feeling of meaningful existence, and experien...

Research on joint attention has addressed both the effects of gaze following and the ability to share representations. It is largely unknown, however, whether sharing attention also affects the perceptual processing of jointly attended objects. This study tested whether attending to stimuli with another person from opposite perspectives induces a t...

The traditional way to study thinking in humans is to investigate cognitive processes in single individuals. The positions laid out in this chapter, by contrast, regard social interaction as the default context within which cognition occurs. The chapter introduces and discusses the theoretical background as well as relevant empirical findings of th...