The Neuroscience of Social Behavior

The neuroscience of social interaction

The increasing refinement of fMRI has given neuroscientists insights into how the living cortex participates in a host of human scenarios. This approach has had a dramatic impact on the study of social interactions. Suddenly fields as diverse as robotics, primate behaviour, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and child psychology have a dynamic relationship to socially crippling conditions such as au...

The Neuroscience of Social Cognition

The social neuroscience of empathy.

The phenomenon of empathy entails the ability to share the affective experiences of others. In recent years social neuroscience made considerable progress in revealing the mechanisms that enable a person to feel what another is feeling. The present review provides an in-depth and critical discussion of these findings. Consistent evidence shows that sharing the emotions of others is associated w...

The neuroscience of social understanding

How do we understand and engage with the purposeful, emotional and mental activities of other people and how does this knowledge develop? What can recent work on mirror neurons in monkeys and human beings teach us about how the brain supports social understanding? According to Intentional Relations Theory (Barresi and Moore 1996), the understanding of the self-other equivalence requires concurr...

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy

Empathy is a complex psychological response in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others (Ickes, 1997). There is broad agreement about two primary components of empathy: (1) an affective response to another person, which may (but not always) entail sharing that person’s emotional state; and (2) a cognitive capacit...