Are we capturing individual differences? Evaluating the test-retest reliability of experimental tasks used to measure social cognitive abilities.

ABSTRACT: Social cognitive skills are crucial for positive interpersonal relationships, health, and wellbeing and encompass both automatic and reflexive processes. To assess this myriad of skills, researchers have developed numerous experimental tasks that measure automatic imitation, emotion recognition, empathy, perspective taking, and intergroup bias and have used these to reveal important individual differences in social cognition. However, the very reason these tasks produce robust experimental effects - low between-participant variability - can make their use as correlational tools problematic. We performed an evaluation of test-retest reliability for common experimental tasks that measure social cognition. One-hundred and fifty participants completed the race-Implicit Association Test (r-IAT)

SUBMITTER: Pennington CR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11785611 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature