Social behavior

Abstract

Social neuroscience seeks both to understand how the brain gives rise to cognitive processes required for social interaction and decision making, and to understand the neural mechanisms of and to help design treatments for dysfunctions of social cognition. Although it is a relatively young field, emerging from cognitive and affective neuroscience in the early 1990s, social neuroscience has roots in approaches to the brain and social function that date back to the nineteenth century. This chapter will provide a brief history of those approaches and a brief primer on two key methods within social neuroscience prior to turning to eight critical themes within the field in the twenty-first century: face processing, emotion and social decisions, simulation processes and theory of mind, moral action, and social dysfunction in autism.