Backchannels (BCs; listener signals such as ‘mmhm’ or ‘okay’) are a ubiquitous and essential feature of spoken interaction. They are used by listeners predominantly to support the ongoing turn of their interlocutor and to signal understanding and agreement. Listeners seem to be highly sensitive to the exact realisations of BCs and to judge deviations from typical forms as negative. Very little is known about the use of BCs by speakers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In dialogue recordings of 28 German adults in two groups of disposition-matched dyads (i.e., both interlocutors were either autistic or non-autistic), we found that the ASD group was characterised by (1) a lower rate of BCs per minute (particularly in the early stages of conversation), (2) less diversity in the lexical realisation of BCs and (3) a less diverse and flexible mapping of different intonation contours to different BC types. We interpret these results as reflecting more general characteristics of autistic as compared to non-autistic individuals, namely different strategies in signalling attention towards an interlocutor and less flexible behaviour in social interaction.

The relation between communication partners is crucial for the success of their interaction. This is also true for artificial social agents. However, the more we engage in artificial relationships, the more we are forced to regulate and control them. I refer to this as binding paradox. This deserves attention during technological developments and requires professional supervision during ongoing interactions.

Recent improvements in virtual reality (VR) allow for the representation of authentic environments and multiple users in a shared complex virtual world in real time. These advances have fostered clinical applications including in psychiatry. However, although VR is already used in clinical settings to help people with mental disorders (e.g., exposure therapy), the related ethical issues require greater attention. Based on a thematic literature search the authors identified five themes that raise ethical concerns related to the clinical use of VR: (1) reality and its representation, (2) autonomy, (3) privacy, (4) self-diagnosis and self-treatment, and (5) expectation bias. Reality and its representation is a theme that lies at the heart of VR, but is also of specific significance in a clinical context when perceptions of reality are concerned, for example, during psychosis. Closely associated is the autonomy of VR users. Although autonomy is a much-considered topic in biomedical ethics, it has not been sufficiently discussed when it comes to applications of VR in psychiatry. In this review, the authors address the different themes and recommend the development of an ethical framework for the clinical use of VR.

In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be studied and could – paradoxically – be seen as representing the “dark matter” of social neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for investigations that allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are in interaction with others rather than merely observing them. In this article, we outline the theoretical conception of a second-person approach to other minds and review evidence from neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies, and related fields to argue for the development of a second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really “go social”; this may also be relevant for our understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition.

In this response we address additions to as well as criticisms and possible misinterpretations of our proposal for a second-person neuroscience. We map out the most crucial aspects of our approach by (1) acknowledging that second-person engaged interaction is not the only way to understand others, although we claim that it is ontogenetically prior; (2) claiming that spectatorial paradigms need to be complemented in order to enable a full understanding of social interactions; and (3) restating that our theoretical proposal not only questions the mechanism by which a cognitive process comes into being, but asks whether it is at all meaningful to speak of a mechanism and a cognitive process when it is confined to intra-agent space. We address theoretical criticisms of our approach by pointing out that while a second-person social understanding may not be the only mechanism, alternative approaches cannot hold their ground without resorting to second-person concepts, if not in the expression, certainly in the development of social understanding. In this context, we also address issues of agency and intentionality, theoretical alternatives, and clinical implications of our approach.