Social Neuroscience Toward Understanding the Underpinnings of the Social Mind

by Todorov, Alexander; Fiske, Susan; Prentice, Deborah

• ISBN13: 9780195316872
• ISBN10: 0195316878
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The field of social cognitive neuroscience has captured the attention of many researchers during the past ten years. Much of the impetus for this new field came from the development of functional neuroimaging methods that made it possible to unobtrusively measure brain activation over time.Using these methods over the last 30 years has allowed psychologists to move from simple validation questions - would flashing stimuli activate the visual cortex - to those about the functional specialization of brain regions - are there regions in the inferior temporal cortex dedicated to faceprocessing - to questions that, just a decade ago, would have been considered to be intractable at such a level of analysis. These so-called "intractable" questions are the focus of the chapters in this book, which introduces social cognitive neuroscience research addressing questions of fundamental importance to social psychology: How do we understand and represent other people? How do we represent social groups? How dowe regulate our emotions and socially undesirable responses? This book also presents innovative combinations of multiple methodologies, including behavioral experiments, computer modeling, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiments, Event-Related Potential (ERP) experiments, and brainlesion studies. It is divided into four sections. The first three sections present the latest research on, respectively, understanding and representing other people, representing social groups, and the interplay of cognition and emotion in social regulation. In the fourth section, contributors stepback and consider a range of novel topics that have emerged in the context of social neuroscience research: understanding social exclusion as pain, deconstructing our moral intuitions, understanding cooperative exchanges with other agents, and the effect of aging on brain function and itsimplications for well-being. Taken together, these chapters provide a rich introduction to an exciting, rapidly developing and expanding field that promises a richer and deeper understanding of the social mind.

Author Biography

Alexander Todorov, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University

Susan T. Fiske, PhD, is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University

Deborah Prentice, PhD, is a Professor of Psychology and Department Chair of Psychology at Princeton University

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. vii
Introduction	p. xi
Understanding and Representing Other People
How Has Cognitive Neuroscience Contributed to Social Psychological Theory?	p. 3
You, Me, and My Brain: Self and Other Representations in Social Cognitive Neuroscience	p. 14
Distributed Process for Retrieval of Person Knowledge	p. 40
Evaluating Faces on Social Dimensions	p. 54
Social Neuroscience and the Representation of Others: Commentary	p. 77
Understanding and Representing Social Groups
Perceiving Social Category Information from Faces: Using ERPs to Study Person Perception	p. 85
Self-Regulation in Intergroup Relations: A Social Neuroscience Framework	p. 101
Perceiving Humanity or Not: A Social Neuroscience Approach to Dehumanized Perception	p. 123
Us versus Them: The Social Neuroscience of Perceiving Out-groups	p. 135
Regulation of Social Behavior
Self-Regulation and Evaluative Processing	p. 147
The Neural Basis of Emotional Decision-Making	p. 160
Social Neuroscience of Asymmetrical Frontal Cortical Activity: Considering Anger and Approach Motivation	p. 173
Why Symbolic Processing of Affect Can Disrupt Negative Affect: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Investigations	p. 188
Emotion in Social Neuroscience	p. 210
Navigating Social Life
The Social Brain in Interactive Games	p. 217
Social Pain: Experiential, Neurocognitive, and Genetic Correlates	p. 229
Could an Aging Brain Contribute to Subjective Well-Being? The Value Added by a Social Neuroscience Perspective	p. 249
Social Neuroscience and the Soul's Last Stand	p. 263
Building a Social Brain	p. 274
General Commentary
Hanging with Social Neuroscientists	p. 284
Author Index	p. 287
Subject Index	p. 301
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