An Examination of Social Cognition, Empathy, and Narrative Abilities in Young Adults

Krystin A Biscardi, Pace University

Abstract

Storytelling, including narratives about autobiographical memories, entails a complex process of translating rich nonverbal experiences, replete with emotional, perceptual, and sensory elements, into words. The referential process has been proposed as a general cognitive model, which is comprised of three distinct yet interconnected phases (i.e., Arousal, Symbolizing, and Reflecting/Reorganizing), that captures the strength of the connection between one’s emotional experience and its narrative form and carries meaningful real-world implications, including psychotherapy outcomes. The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between referential and social-cognitive processes (e.g., social perception, empathy) in the context of early and recent personal narratives shared by a convenience sample of college students. Findings of the current investigation indicated positive correlations between social perception and empathy with indices of Affect and Reflecting/Reorganizing at a small to moderate effect size. Overall models with social perception and empathy as continuous predicting variables and all referential processes as continuous outcome variables had a statistically non-significant fit with strong effect sizes. Controlling for social perception, empathy was significantly and positively related to the mean total sum of affective language at a strong effect size within the early memory condition. Controlling for empathy, social perception was negatively related to indices of Symbolizing at a small to moderate effect size, contrary to hypotheses. No statistically significant correlations were found between empathy and social perception abilities. Indices of Symbolizing were found to be commensurate across early and recent memory conditions, suggesting that the ability to engage in emotional time travel may not be temporally bound. Consistent with the story-telling nature of the task, significantly higher levels of Symbolizing than Reflecting/Reorganizing processes were found in personal narratives. Gender differences in empathy were found at a moderate effect size. Lastly, subjectively rated valence positively predicted indices of the Symbolizing phase at a small to moderate effect size across early and recent memory conditions, lending evidence to the enhancing effect of positive emotion. Moreover, higher emotional valence was associated with a decrease in negative affective language and higher proportions of positive affect terms. In all, this preliminary study sheds light on the complexities of the referential process and its interface with key social-cognitive constructs. Findings provide a foray to a broader, more inclusive study entailing clinical populations, including ASD, psychophysiological indices of emotional arousal, as well as audio and video analysis.

Subject Area

Psychology|Cognitive psychology|Physiological psychology

Recommended Citation

Biscardi, Krystin A, "An Examination of Social Cognition, Empathy, and Narrative Abilities in Young Adults" (2023). ETD Collection for Pace University. AAI30421655.
https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/dissertations/AAI30421655

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