Relative Self-Other Representations as Determinants of Social Affect and Cognition - A Theoretical Framework and Systematic Review

Social interactions and interpersonal relationships are undisputed pillars of our mental health and well-being. In order to maintain these relationships and navigate the social world, we are required to be able to resonate with and understand others’ affective and cognitive states. These abilities comprise empathy - the isomorphic sharing of another person’s emotions, that can yield both empathic distress and empathic concern-, and cognitive perspective-taking, which describes the ability to reason and make inferences about another person’s cognitive or affective state. Maladaptive socio-affective and -cognitive capacities have accordingly gained relevance in the study of social functioning impairments in mental disorders, and recent critical appraisals of empathy propose u-shaped associations with mental health outcomes. In spite of these non-linear accounts posing advancements in the field, it is to be questioned whether the adaptivity of socio-affective and -cognitive capacities can be inferred from a purely quantitative consideration of understanding or resonating with others’ affective or cognitive states. Here, we propose to illuminate a lower-level precursor of empathy and perspective-taking, namely, the relative mental representations of the self and the other. Although empirical findings demonstrate that information processing of not only another’s but also one’s own states are involved in social affect and cognition, previous research is predominantly restricted to the representation of another’s cognitive or affective state to infer socio-affective and -cognitive capacities. In a comprehensive theoretical framework, we propose the relative representation of the self and the other, generated by spontaneous and volitional self-other referential processing, as the determinants of socio-affective and -cognitive outcomes. We suggest a flexible co-representation of the self and the other to provide the most adaptive outcomes of social affect and cognition, while biased or blurry representations overall might entail social functioning impairments and, in the long run, mental health problems. In a systematic review, we explore preliminary empirical support for our framework by synthesizing study findings on associations between self-other-referential processes on the one hand and social affect or cognition on the other hand across populations with or without (sub)clinical manifestations of mental disorders. By elucidating the relevance of self- and other-representations in the process of resonating with the social world, our framework makes a relevant contribution to studying social functioning as outcomes of dynamic social processes including both agents and situational demands instead of modeling them as unitary, trait-like abilities. Deciphering observable empathy or perspective-taking outcomes in their underlying subprocesses provides crucial insights into the emergence, development, and potentially compensatory fluctuations in socio-affective and -cognitive patterns in healthy and clinical populations.