Assessing Social Perception

Social perception is the ability to read selected social cues in order to make judgements about the behaviour, attitudes and emotions of others (McFall, 1982).

Social cues include:

  • Facial expression and tone of voice
  • Gesture and “body language”
  • Contextual information
  • Knowledge of the world

People who suffer brain damage can have impaired social perception and this has significant impacts on their everyday interactions. Professor Skye McDonald specialises in the field of neuropsychology and has developed a test (The Awareness of Social Inference Test or TASIT) to assess social perception. Please visit the neuropsychology section of our website for more information. Please click here to download a PDF poster of a psychometric study of TASIT. TASIT can be purchased here.

In Profile

  • Associate Professor Eva Kimonis

    Associate Professor Eva Kimonis

    Research Areas: Developmental psychopathology; child clinical psychology; externalising and conduct problems; aggression and antisocial behaviour; violent offending; development, assessment and treatment of callous-unemotional traits and psychopathy.

  • Associate Professor Thomas Whitford

    Associate Professor Thomas Whitford

    Research Areas: Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders; schizotypy; understanding the psychological and neurophysiological basis of delusions and hallucinations; understanding the basis of sensory suppression to self-generated actions; Event-Related Potentials (ERPs); Diffusion-Tensor Imaging (DTI).

  • Professor Jessica Grisham

    Professor Jessica Grisham

    Research Areas: Obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoarding disorder, and related disorders. Comorbidity and classification of anxiety disorders. Investigations into processes that are associated with various types of psychopathology, including emotion regulation and thought suppression.

  • Dr Jenny Richmond

    Dr Jenny Richmond

    My research program addresses the development of memory and emotion during infancy and early childhood and takes a developmental cognitive neuroscience approach. I am particularly interested in the development of relational memory and the role it might play in representational flexibility. My recent work has looked at age-related changes in episodic memory and future thinking during early childhood and the development of rapid facial mimicry in infancy.

Ethics and Sona Resources

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