文档介绍：Neuron
Review
Conceptual Challenges and Directions
for Social Neuroscience
Ralph Adolphs1,*
1California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
*Correspondence: ******@
DOI .
Social neuroscience has been enormously essful and is making major contributions to fields ranging
from psychiatry to economics. Yet deep and interesting conceptual challenges abound. Is social information
processing domain specific? Is it universal or susceptible to individual differences and effects of culture? Are
there uniquely human social cognitive abilities? What is the ‘‘social brain,’’ and how do we map social
psychological processes onto it? Animal models together with fMRI and other cognitive neuroscience
approaches in humans are providing an unprecedented level of detail and many surprising results. It may
well be that social neuroscience in the near future will give us an entirely new view of who we are, how we
evolved, and what might be in store for the future of our species.
Introduction study of decision making (as in the investigation of social factors
Social neuroscience was first coined as a term and proposed in neuroeconomics) (Camerer, 2003; Fehr and Camerer, 2007)to
as a field in 1992, at the beginning of the Decade of the Brain, the study of numerous psychiatric illnesses (from autism to
in an article that stressed the need to apply an interdisciplinary, schizophrenia) (Cacioppo et al., 2007) and highlighted a number
multilevel analysis to understanding social behavior and cogni- of animal models (see Sokolowski [this issue of Neuron]). So
tion (Cacioppo and Berntson, 1992). Yet at that time, one of the dominant is the approach in the behavioral and social sciences,
major tools available to study the social brain—neuroimaging— in particular the use of fMRI to probe cognitive processes, that it
was limited. Following earlier studies using positron emission threatens to displace traditional behavioral econ