Kim A. Bard: Emotion and social cognition viewed from comparative and developmental perspectives

Title: Emotion and social cognition viewed from comparative and developmental perspectives.

Kim A. Bard, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, UK

When studying cognitive and affective development, many fields use human infants as the comparison group.  My field is primatology and I study social cognition and emotion comparing chimpanzees to humans.  Other fields such as affective computing, rely on human development as the foundation for modelling.  Most developmental studies are biased, in part, by sampling primarily western, middle-to-high-income infants that live in mostly urban settings (earning the acronym of WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic: Henrich et al., 2010), and thereby represent only 10% of the world’s population. Unconscious bias is present in theories of social cognition, such as Shared Intentionality (SI: e.g., Tomasello, 2019), when they rely on WEIRD databases to represent the human species and explain primarily WEIRD phenomena.

This talk is structured around a 5-step plan for decolonizing studies (based on Bard et al., 2021), focusing on how comparative scientists can think about, and develop inclusivity practices for their studies, beginning with understanding the phenomenon and including sampling and theory-building.  I present our findings that joint attention is widespread in chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relative (counter to claims of SI Theory that joint attention is human-unique).  More importantly, the forms of joint attention differ across diverse settings, and in our study, all were different from the WEIRD form commonly reported in the literature. I discuss the role of emotion in joint attention, and how the WEIRD form is not universal nor species-unique.  I focus on triadic connectedness as the core concept in joint attention, which encompasses the ways that human and great ape infants engage together with their social partners about things within their everyday ecological contexts.  Comparative and evolutionary theories, such as SI, require urgent revision to become (more) inclusive, a process that will allow our theories to embrace the diversity that exists among humans and great apes in social cognition and emotion.

BIO:

Kim A. Bard, PhD is Professor of Comparative Developmental Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, UK.  Her interests span across several topics, including emotional development, gestural communication, mirror self-recognition, intersubjectivity, attachment, social cognition, and methodologies in comparative science.  For the last 40 years, she has worked in this field, combining comparative perspectives with developmental perspectives, in studies with chimpanzees, orangutans, and humans. Bard served as President of the Primate Society of Great Britain, and as President of the European Federation for Primatology.  She serves as Associate Editor for Animal Cognition, Primates, Animals, and Emotion Review, is on the Editorial Board for American Journal of Primatology and Child Development Perspectives, and is co-Guest Editor for a Special Issue of Frontiers in Psychology (with G. Saucius, T. Persson, and V. Fantasia) on Shared Intentionality.  She is co-Editor of two books, Reaching into Thought: The Minds of the Great Apes (with Anne Russon & Sue Taylor Parker, published with Cambridge University Press), and The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development (with Heidi Keller, published with The MIT Press).  Bard has over 140 publications, and was lead author for the 2021 article in Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, entitled “Joint attention in human and chimpanzee infants in varied socio-ecological contexts”.