The Student’s Guide to Social Neuroscience
C1 Introduction to social neuroscience
Hyperscanning = the simultaneous recording from two or more different brain (using fMRI or EEG).
The emergence of social neuroscience
Social psychology = attempt to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of
individuals are influenced by the actual imagined or implied presence of others.
Social neuroscience = attempt to understand and explain, using neural mechanisms, how thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others.
Social neuroscience can be seen as a subdiscipline within social psychology that is distinguished only by its
adherence to neuroscientific methods and/or theories. But most researchers working in the field do not have
backgrounds within social psychology but are from fields of cognitive psychology/neuroscience.
Cognitive psychology = study of mental processes such as thinking, perceiving, speaking, acting, and
planning.
Dissects processes into different submechanisms and explain complex behavior in terms of their
interaction.
Important role in social neuroscience decompose complex social behaviors into simpler
mechanisms operating in individual minds. Exploration with neuroscientific methodologies.
Social neuroscience links cognitive and social psychology, mind (psychology) with brain (biology,
neuroscience).
However, many areas of study that now fall under the social neuroscience umbrella were already active
areas of study prior to 1992.
In cognitive psychology, there was a mature literature on face perception. However, this literature
was primarily concerned with under-standing faces as a type of visual object rather than treating
faces as cues to social interactions.
How social behavior breaks down as a result of acquired brain damage or in developmental
conditions such as autism.
In behavioral neuroscience interest in emotional processes such as fear, aggression, and
separation distress.
In social psychology, the field of ‘social cognition’ applied the approach and methods of cognitive
psychology (e.g. response time) to social psychology questions.
Finally, the 1990s saw the refinement of the newly established methods of cognitive neuroscience,
such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation
(TMS), and these methods were directed to social processes as well as to the more traditional areas
within cognitive psychology.
2000 social neuroscience could be recognized as a relatively coherent entity with a core set of
research issues and methods as reflected in prominent reviews of the time.
2006 Social neuroscience and SCAN first journals.
2008 and 2018 Society for Social and Affective Neuroscience and Society for Social
Neuroscience.
Although we have moved from regions to networks, the next is to identify the flow of information through
these networks to follow social information processing from stimulus through to response. This requires an
understanding of the detailed computations implemented by the different nodes in the networks as well the
dynamic interplay between them. One could make the analogy of moving from words (brain areas) to
sentences (networks) to propositions (arrangements of network dynamics) to conversations (brains
interacting). We are still solidly in the age of sentences and are only beginning to enter the age of
propositions and conversations.
,The social brain?
One overarching issue within social neuroscience is the extent to which the ‘social brain’ can be considered
distinct from all the other functions that the brain carries out.
Modularity = the notion that certain cognitive processes (or regions of the brain) are restricted in the type of
information they process, and the type of processing carried out.
Domain specificity = the idea that a cognitive process (or brain region) is specialized for processing only
one particular kind of information.
A module is the term given to a computational routine that responds to particular inputs and performs a
particular computation on them; that is, a routine that is highly specialized in terms of what it does to what.
One core property that has been attributed to modules is domain specificity, namely that the module
processes only one kind of input.
1 In this modular view, the social brain is special by virtue of brain mechanisms that are specifically
dedicated to social processes. Moreover, it is claimed that these mechanisms evolved to tackle specific
challenges within the social environment. To some critics, this view of the mind and brain resembles
phrenology = created maps of the brain containing highly specialized functions, such as love of animals,
which were based on anecdotal observations of individual skull shapes. However, such criticisms of
modern approaches are not entirely fair given that they are subjected to experimental rigor that was never
applied to nineteenth-century ideas of the brain localization of function.
Brain regions tend to connect sparsely to a limited number of other regions. The consequence of this is that
different brain regions will inevitably have different specializations. What is more challenging to explain is
why this specialization would ever be quite so narrow as to be limited to only one kind of information.
Very narrow specialization may emerge developmentally through experience and via fine-tuning
of brain regions initiated by top-down category knowledge (e.g. face v. non-face, social v. non-
social). It may alternatively be the case that we have to rethink domain specificity in terms of
‘limited domains’ i.p.v. ‘single domains’.
2 Alternative: social brain is not specialized uniquely for social behavior but is also involved in non-social
aspects of cognition. Social cognition and non-social cognition evolved hand in hand, but they did not lead
to highly specialized routines in the brain for dealing with social problems evolution of general neural
and cognitive mechanisms that increase intellect (bigger brains) may make us socially smarter too +
evolutionary need to be socially smarter leads to general cognitive advances in other domains is also
possible.
3 Mitchell (2009) social psychology distinguishes itself from other aspects of cognition because it
relates to concepts that are less stable and definite. The social brain is special because of the nature of
information that is processed rather than because it is social.
4 Another possibility not particular regions of social brain that are special, but neural mechanisms
especially suited to social processes.
Mirror neurons respond both when an animal sees an action per-formed by someone else and when they
perform the same action themselves. There may be a simple mechanism – implemented at the level of
single neurons – that enables a correspondence between self and other. Mirror neurons have been
implicated in imitation (see Chapter 3), empathy, and ‘mind reading’ (see Chapter 6). Although they were
,originally discovered for actions, it is possible that mirroring is a general property of many neurons (e.g.
those processing pain, emotion, etc.) and they may not be tightly localized to one region. Whereas some
researchers have argued that mirror neurons serve a specifically social function others have suggested that
they arise primarily out of associative learning between action and perception in both social and non-social
contexts such as observing one’s own actions.
Barrett and Satpute (2013) offer a useful overview of this general debate concerning the nature of the social
and emotional brain. 3 ways in which the social brain may be implemented.
Simple domain-specific view consisting of brain regions that are specialized for processing
particular kinds of social information and non-social information. Few contemporary researchers
would endorse such view.
Contemporary ideas: second and third scenario.
Second scenario networks of regions, each region in the network has a high degree of
specialization.
Third scenario neither brain regions nor individual brain networks are functionally specialized or
segregated into social and non-social functions.
Hybrid scenarios that have elements of each.
In summary
There is a variety of views concerning the broad nature of the neural mechanisms that support
human social behavior.
At one end, there is the view that there are highly specialized neural mechanisms. These may be
very limited in the type of information they process (e.g. faces, beliefs).
At the other end, there is the view that the mechanisms that support social behavior are used for
many other functions (possibly including non-social cognition).
Whereas the highly specialized viewpoint tends to have been linked to the idea of a small number
of contributing brain regions (localizability), it is not incompatible with the idea of brain networks.
Is neuroscience an appropriate level of explanation for studying social behavior?
Criticism: brain is not the most appropriate level of explanation for understanding social processes. Social
processes need to be studied and understood at the social level.
Reductionism. Most researchers not strongly reductionism = one explanation will become replaced with
another, more basic, type of explanation over time social psychology will not be replaced by concepts of
neuroscience. Most researchers in social neuroscience are attempting to create bridges between different
levels of explanation rather than replace one.
Reverse inference. Infer nature of cognitive processes from neuroscience data. For example the nature of
various moral dilemmas has been inferred on the basis of whether the dilemmas activate regions of the
brain implicated in emotion or in higher order reasoning
The reliability of this inference depends on what is known about the functions of given regions. If these
regions turned out to have very different functions, then the inference would be flawed. Also, the function
of regions is not resolutely fixed but depends on the context in which they are employed. Reverse inference
may be improved by examining networks of regions or examining more precise regions + another more
general methodological point is the importance of not being over-reliant on neuroimaging data, but to look
at other sources of evidence such as non-invasive brain stimulation in which behavior itself is normally
measured.
Brain-based data could have no significant impact on understanding of social processes in the blank slate
scenario.
Blank slate = The idea that the brain learns environmental contingencies without imposing any biases,
constraints, or preexisting knowledge on that learning.
, The brain is not completely redundant (still implements social behavior) but the nature of social
interactions are entirely attributable to culture, society, environment.
The structure of our social environment is created entirely within the environment itself, reflecting
arbitrary but perpetuated historical precedents. Thus, culture, society, and the nature of social
interactions invent and shape themselves.
A more realistic scenario is that the brain, and its underlying processes, creates constraints on social
processes.
Social processes are all in the brain, but some of them are created by environmental constraints and
historical accidents (and learned by the brain) whereas others may be caused by the inherent organization,
biases, and limitations of the brain itself.
Aggression as an example of interacting levels of explanation
What causes aggression and what causes variability in levels of aggression? These questions may generate
quite different answers. To give a non-social analogy, the typical number of fingers that we have on our
hands (i.e. ten) is almost entirely down to our biology, whereas the variability in the number of fingers we
have on our hands is almost entirely down to environment, such as industrial accidents.
Whilst income inequality is itself cultural, and not biological, the fact that aggression is linked to resource
control and perceived injustice is likely to be independent of culture and, instead, be a biological instinct.
Cultural differences may act as an ‘accelerator’ (lax gun laws, income inequality) or ‘brake’ (strict gun
laws, income equality) on neurobiological incentives concerning status and fairness.
Levels of testosterone in males are correlated with levels of aggression in people of low SES individuals
but not high SES. So high SES acts as a brake on biological influences, but low SES may bring to the fore
biologically bound instincts for achieving status and securing resources.
A biological basis for culture?
What is culture? A neuroscientific answer could be ‘neural mechanisms that respond to the repeated
patterns of behavior in others, whom we affiliate positively with and increase the likelihood that our own
neural mechanism will generate those behaviors’.
As to the question of what creates variability in culture, the answer could be quite different. It may reflect,
for instance, the different environments that people live in and arbitrary historical precedents. However, the
number of cultural variants may not be limitless.
Hauser (2009): there could be some cultural forms that will never be created or, if they are, will
rapidly die out because they are too difficult to acquire – that is, biology may go as far as to
specify which cultural variants are likely, possible, or virtually impossible.
However, the existence of a cultural variant such as slavery may require particular kinds of
neurocognitive mechanisms: the switching off of empathic processes towards the slave group and
particular kinds of thoughts that drive this (e.g. dehumanization). - An impossible culture:
slavery associated with high levels of empathy and humane cognitions towards the slave group.
The impossibility is created by the nature of brain-based mechanisms, even though it manifests
itself in terms of the nature of social processes.
Gene-culture co-evolution
Cultural neuroscience = an interdisciplinary field bridging cultural psychology, neurosciences and
neurogenetics that explains how neurobiological processes give rise to cultural values, practices, and beliefs
as well as how culture shapes neurobiological processes.
Top-down Cultural differences will impact the brain.
Bottom-up Brain will impact on culture.
What it does. Examining how immersion in different cultural systems affects the functioning of
different brain networks an also how differences in biology might be linked to cultural practice.
Skepticism to this approach.
C1 Introduction to social neuroscience
Hyperscanning = the simultaneous recording from two or more different brain (using fMRI or EEG).
The emergence of social neuroscience
Social psychology = attempt to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of
individuals are influenced by the actual imagined or implied presence of others.
Social neuroscience = attempt to understand and explain, using neural mechanisms, how thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others.
Social neuroscience can be seen as a subdiscipline within social psychology that is distinguished only by its
adherence to neuroscientific methods and/or theories. But most researchers working in the field do not have
backgrounds within social psychology but are from fields of cognitive psychology/neuroscience.
Cognitive psychology = study of mental processes such as thinking, perceiving, speaking, acting, and
planning.
Dissects processes into different submechanisms and explain complex behavior in terms of their
interaction.
Important role in social neuroscience decompose complex social behaviors into simpler
mechanisms operating in individual minds. Exploration with neuroscientific methodologies.
Social neuroscience links cognitive and social psychology, mind (psychology) with brain (biology,
neuroscience).
However, many areas of study that now fall under the social neuroscience umbrella were already active
areas of study prior to 1992.
In cognitive psychology, there was a mature literature on face perception. However, this literature
was primarily concerned with under-standing faces as a type of visual object rather than treating
faces as cues to social interactions.
How social behavior breaks down as a result of acquired brain damage or in developmental
conditions such as autism.
In behavioral neuroscience interest in emotional processes such as fear, aggression, and
separation distress.
In social psychology, the field of ‘social cognition’ applied the approach and methods of cognitive
psychology (e.g. response time) to social psychology questions.
Finally, the 1990s saw the refinement of the newly established methods of cognitive neuroscience,
such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation
(TMS), and these methods were directed to social processes as well as to the more traditional areas
within cognitive psychology.
2000 social neuroscience could be recognized as a relatively coherent entity with a core set of
research issues and methods as reflected in prominent reviews of the time.
2006 Social neuroscience and SCAN first journals.
2008 and 2018 Society for Social and Affective Neuroscience and Society for Social
Neuroscience.
Although we have moved from regions to networks, the next is to identify the flow of information through
these networks to follow social information processing from stimulus through to response. This requires an
understanding of the detailed computations implemented by the different nodes in the networks as well the
dynamic interplay between them. One could make the analogy of moving from words (brain areas) to
sentences (networks) to propositions (arrangements of network dynamics) to conversations (brains
interacting). We are still solidly in the age of sentences and are only beginning to enter the age of
propositions and conversations.
,The social brain?
One overarching issue within social neuroscience is the extent to which the ‘social brain’ can be considered
distinct from all the other functions that the brain carries out.
Modularity = the notion that certain cognitive processes (or regions of the brain) are restricted in the type of
information they process, and the type of processing carried out.
Domain specificity = the idea that a cognitive process (or brain region) is specialized for processing only
one particular kind of information.
A module is the term given to a computational routine that responds to particular inputs and performs a
particular computation on them; that is, a routine that is highly specialized in terms of what it does to what.
One core property that has been attributed to modules is domain specificity, namely that the module
processes only one kind of input.
1 In this modular view, the social brain is special by virtue of brain mechanisms that are specifically
dedicated to social processes. Moreover, it is claimed that these mechanisms evolved to tackle specific
challenges within the social environment. To some critics, this view of the mind and brain resembles
phrenology = created maps of the brain containing highly specialized functions, such as love of animals,
which were based on anecdotal observations of individual skull shapes. However, such criticisms of
modern approaches are not entirely fair given that they are subjected to experimental rigor that was never
applied to nineteenth-century ideas of the brain localization of function.
Brain regions tend to connect sparsely to a limited number of other regions. The consequence of this is that
different brain regions will inevitably have different specializations. What is more challenging to explain is
why this specialization would ever be quite so narrow as to be limited to only one kind of information.
Very narrow specialization may emerge developmentally through experience and via fine-tuning
of brain regions initiated by top-down category knowledge (e.g. face v. non-face, social v. non-
social). It may alternatively be the case that we have to rethink domain specificity in terms of
‘limited domains’ i.p.v. ‘single domains’.
2 Alternative: social brain is not specialized uniquely for social behavior but is also involved in non-social
aspects of cognition. Social cognition and non-social cognition evolved hand in hand, but they did not lead
to highly specialized routines in the brain for dealing with social problems evolution of general neural
and cognitive mechanisms that increase intellect (bigger brains) may make us socially smarter too +
evolutionary need to be socially smarter leads to general cognitive advances in other domains is also
possible.
3 Mitchell (2009) social psychology distinguishes itself from other aspects of cognition because it
relates to concepts that are less stable and definite. The social brain is special because of the nature of
information that is processed rather than because it is social.
4 Another possibility not particular regions of social brain that are special, but neural mechanisms
especially suited to social processes.
Mirror neurons respond both when an animal sees an action per-formed by someone else and when they
perform the same action themselves. There may be a simple mechanism – implemented at the level of
single neurons – that enables a correspondence between self and other. Mirror neurons have been
implicated in imitation (see Chapter 3), empathy, and ‘mind reading’ (see Chapter 6). Although they were
,originally discovered for actions, it is possible that mirroring is a general property of many neurons (e.g.
those processing pain, emotion, etc.) and they may not be tightly localized to one region. Whereas some
researchers have argued that mirror neurons serve a specifically social function others have suggested that
they arise primarily out of associative learning between action and perception in both social and non-social
contexts such as observing one’s own actions.
Barrett and Satpute (2013) offer a useful overview of this general debate concerning the nature of the social
and emotional brain. 3 ways in which the social brain may be implemented.
Simple domain-specific view consisting of brain regions that are specialized for processing
particular kinds of social information and non-social information. Few contemporary researchers
would endorse such view.
Contemporary ideas: second and third scenario.
Second scenario networks of regions, each region in the network has a high degree of
specialization.
Third scenario neither brain regions nor individual brain networks are functionally specialized or
segregated into social and non-social functions.
Hybrid scenarios that have elements of each.
In summary
There is a variety of views concerning the broad nature of the neural mechanisms that support
human social behavior.
At one end, there is the view that there are highly specialized neural mechanisms. These may be
very limited in the type of information they process (e.g. faces, beliefs).
At the other end, there is the view that the mechanisms that support social behavior are used for
many other functions (possibly including non-social cognition).
Whereas the highly specialized viewpoint tends to have been linked to the idea of a small number
of contributing brain regions (localizability), it is not incompatible with the idea of brain networks.
Is neuroscience an appropriate level of explanation for studying social behavior?
Criticism: brain is not the most appropriate level of explanation for understanding social processes. Social
processes need to be studied and understood at the social level.
Reductionism. Most researchers not strongly reductionism = one explanation will become replaced with
another, more basic, type of explanation over time social psychology will not be replaced by concepts of
neuroscience. Most researchers in social neuroscience are attempting to create bridges between different
levels of explanation rather than replace one.
Reverse inference. Infer nature of cognitive processes from neuroscience data. For example the nature of
various moral dilemmas has been inferred on the basis of whether the dilemmas activate regions of the
brain implicated in emotion or in higher order reasoning
The reliability of this inference depends on what is known about the functions of given regions. If these
regions turned out to have very different functions, then the inference would be flawed. Also, the function
of regions is not resolutely fixed but depends on the context in which they are employed. Reverse inference
may be improved by examining networks of regions or examining more precise regions + another more
general methodological point is the importance of not being over-reliant on neuroimaging data, but to look
at other sources of evidence such as non-invasive brain stimulation in which behavior itself is normally
measured.
Brain-based data could have no significant impact on understanding of social processes in the blank slate
scenario.
Blank slate = The idea that the brain learns environmental contingencies without imposing any biases,
constraints, or preexisting knowledge on that learning.
, The brain is not completely redundant (still implements social behavior) but the nature of social
interactions are entirely attributable to culture, society, environment.
The structure of our social environment is created entirely within the environment itself, reflecting
arbitrary but perpetuated historical precedents. Thus, culture, society, and the nature of social
interactions invent and shape themselves.
A more realistic scenario is that the brain, and its underlying processes, creates constraints on social
processes.
Social processes are all in the brain, but some of them are created by environmental constraints and
historical accidents (and learned by the brain) whereas others may be caused by the inherent organization,
biases, and limitations of the brain itself.
Aggression as an example of interacting levels of explanation
What causes aggression and what causes variability in levels of aggression? These questions may generate
quite different answers. To give a non-social analogy, the typical number of fingers that we have on our
hands (i.e. ten) is almost entirely down to our biology, whereas the variability in the number of fingers we
have on our hands is almost entirely down to environment, such as industrial accidents.
Whilst income inequality is itself cultural, and not biological, the fact that aggression is linked to resource
control and perceived injustice is likely to be independent of culture and, instead, be a biological instinct.
Cultural differences may act as an ‘accelerator’ (lax gun laws, income inequality) or ‘brake’ (strict gun
laws, income equality) on neurobiological incentives concerning status and fairness.
Levels of testosterone in males are correlated with levels of aggression in people of low SES individuals
but not high SES. So high SES acts as a brake on biological influences, but low SES may bring to the fore
biologically bound instincts for achieving status and securing resources.
A biological basis for culture?
What is culture? A neuroscientific answer could be ‘neural mechanisms that respond to the repeated
patterns of behavior in others, whom we affiliate positively with and increase the likelihood that our own
neural mechanism will generate those behaviors’.
As to the question of what creates variability in culture, the answer could be quite different. It may reflect,
for instance, the different environments that people live in and arbitrary historical precedents. However, the
number of cultural variants may not be limitless.
Hauser (2009): there could be some cultural forms that will never be created or, if they are, will
rapidly die out because they are too difficult to acquire – that is, biology may go as far as to
specify which cultural variants are likely, possible, or virtually impossible.
However, the existence of a cultural variant such as slavery may require particular kinds of
neurocognitive mechanisms: the switching off of empathic processes towards the slave group and
particular kinds of thoughts that drive this (e.g. dehumanization). - An impossible culture:
slavery associated with high levels of empathy and humane cognitions towards the slave group.
The impossibility is created by the nature of brain-based mechanisms, even though it manifests
itself in terms of the nature of social processes.
Gene-culture co-evolution
Cultural neuroscience = an interdisciplinary field bridging cultural psychology, neurosciences and
neurogenetics that explains how neurobiological processes give rise to cultural values, practices, and beliefs
as well as how culture shapes neurobiological processes.
Top-down Cultural differences will impact the brain.
Bottom-up Brain will impact on culture.
What it does. Examining how immersion in different cultural systems affects the functioning of
different brain networks an also how differences in biology might be linked to cultural practice.
Skepticism to this approach.
