Posted February 2, Reviewed by Kaja Perina. I come in darkness, but fill the mind with light. I can bring just as likely fear as delight. What am I? It feels like riding a hamster wheel leading nowhere while leaving the fearful mind exhausted. After all, the hamsters who rode the wheels daily were shown to have enhanced well-being and less stereotypical or escapist behaviors compared to the ones who did not have such an opportunity.
It is plausible that ruminating about what others think or feel might eventually pay off, leading to enhanced social connectedness.
The ability to understand other minds, also known as Theory of Mind ToM or mentalizing represents an essential ingredient for navigating social environments and for decoding the mental lives of people around us based on the often ambiguous cues that they offer. By definition, anxiety is a future-oriented emotion characterized by negative valence, high arousal, and an aversive experience of enhanced uncertainty. Patients with social anxiety disorder in some studies showed what appeared to be an enhanced cognitive empathy, but had lower accuracy on ToM tasks asking them to infer emotions from movies or in the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.
The authors suggest that socially anxious people seem to work in the opposite direction of people with autism spectrum conditions whose inferences about the mental states of other people are absent or very limited — however, they are not necessarily more successful at actually reading other minds. How can this apparent paradox be explained?
Most importantly, they found that it was their experience of enhanced uncertainty, and not simply greater arousal which explained this egocentric tendency. The terror management theory proposes that our cultural worldviews are shaped by our perceived vulnerabilities and buffered by our delusions of consensual validation.
