scholarly journals Seven Computations of the Social Brain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanaz Molapour ◽  
Cindy C Hagan ◽  
Brian Silston ◽  
Haiyan Wu ◽  
Maxwell Ramstead ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Multiple Modalities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Processing Demands ◽  
Social Signaling ◽  
The Brain

ABSTRACT The social environment presents the human brain with the most complex of information processing demands. The computations that the brain must perform occur in parallel, combine social and nonsocial cues, produce verbal and non-verbal signals, and involve multiple cognitive systems; including memory, attention, emotion, learning. This occurs dynamically and at timescales ranging from milliseconds to years. Here, we propose that during social interactions, seven core operations interact to underwrite coherent social functioning; these operations accumulate evidence efficiently – from multiple modalities – when inferring what to do next. We deconstruct the social brain and outline the key components entailed for successful human social interaction. These include (1) social perception; (2) social inferences, such as mentalizing; (3) social learning; (4) social signaling through verbal and non-verbal cues; (5) social drives (e.g., how to increase one’s status); (6) determining the social identity of agents, including oneself; and (7) minimizing uncertainty within the current social context by integrating sensory signals and inferences. We argue that while it is important to examine these distinct aspects of social inference, to understand the true nature of the human social brain, we must also explain how the brain integrates information from the social world.

scholarly journals Perceiving actions before they happen: psychological dimensions scaffold neural action prediction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A Thornton ◽  
Diana I Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Social World ◽  
Action Space ◽  
Action Prediction ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Resonance Imaging ◽  
The Social ◽  
Psychological Dimensions ◽  
The Brain

Abstract The social world buzzes with action. People constantly walk, talk, eat, work, play, snooze and so on. To interact with others successfully, we need to both understand their current actions and predict their future actions. Here we used functional neuroimaging to test the hypothesis that people do both at the same time: when the brain perceives an action, it simultaneously encodes likely future actions. Specifically, we hypothesized that the brain represents perceived actions using a map that encodes which actions will occur next: the six-dimensional Abstraction, Creation, Tradition, Food(-relevance), Animacy and Spiritualism Taxonomy (ACT-FAST) action space. Within this space, the closer two actions are, the more likely they are to precede or follow each other. To test this hypothesis, participants watched a video featuring naturalistic sequences of actions while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. We first use a decoding model to demonstrate that the brain uses ACT-FAST to represent current actions. We then successfully predicted as-yet unseen actions, up to three actions into the future, based on their proximity to the current action’s coordinates in ACT-FAST space. This finding suggests that the brain represents actions using a six-dimensional action space that gives people an automatic glimpse of future actions.

scholarly journals Perspectives from affective science on understanding the nature of emotion

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 239821281881262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Fox
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Affective Neuroscience ◽  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
Scientific Consensus ◽  
Affective Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Brain

Emotions are at the heart of how we understand the human mind and of our relationships within the social world. Yet, there is still no scientific consensus on the fundamental nature of emotion. A central quest within the discipline of affective science is to develop an in-depth understanding of emotions, moods, and feelings and how they are embodied within the brain (affective neuroscience). This article provides a brief overview of the scientific study of emotion with a particular emphasis on psychological and neuroscientific perspectives. Following a selective snapshot of past and present research in this field, some current challenges and controversies in affective science are highlighted.

Sickness and the social brain: How the immune system regulates behavior across species

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Devlin ◽  
Caroline J. Smith ◽  
Staci D. Bilbo
Keyword(s):  
Immune System ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Behavior Changes ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Evolutionary Origins ◽  
Immune Mediators ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sickness Behaviors ◽  
The Brain

Many instances of sickness critically involve the immune system. The immune system talks to the brain in a bi-directional loop. This discourse affords the immune system immense control, such that it can influence behavior and optimize recovery from illness. These behavioral responses to infection are called sickness behaviors and can manifest in many ways, including changes in mood, motivation, or energy. Fascinatingly, most of these changes are conserved across species, and most organisms demonstrate some form of sickness behaviors. One of the most interesting sickness behaviors, and not immediately obvious, is altered sociability. Here, we discuss how the immune system impacts social behavior, by examining the brain regions and immune mediators involved in this process. We first outline how social behavior changes in response to infection in various species. Next, we explore which brain regions control social behavior and their evolutionary origins. Finally, we describe which immune mediators establish the link between illness and social behavior, in the context of both normal development and infection. Overall, we hope to make clear the striking similarities between the mechanisms that facilitate changes in sociability in derived and ancestral vertebrate, as well as invertebrate, species.

scholarly journals From speech and talkers to the social world: The neural processing of human spoken language

Science ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 366 (6461) ◽  
pp. 58-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie K. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Social World ◽  
Neural Processing ◽  
Linguistic Processing ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Use

Human speech perception is a paradigm example of the complexity of human linguistic processing; however, it is also the dominant way of expressing vocal identity and is critically important for social interactions. Here, I review the ways that the speech, the talker, and the social nature of speech interact and how this may be computed in the human brain, using models and approaches from nonhuman primate studies. I explore the extent to which domain-general approaches may be able to account for some of these neural findings. Finally, I address the importance of extending these findings into a better understanding of the social use of speech in conversations.

Depressive Symptoms and Self-Esteem as Moderators of Metaperceptions of Social Rejection Versus Acceptance: A Truth and Bias Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-265
Author(s):  
Daniel Moritz ◽  
John E. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Depressive Symptoms ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Rejection ◽  
Bias Analysis ◽  
Depressive Realism ◽  
The Social

Metaperception involves making judgments regarding what others think of us and is important in navigating the social world. We measured the degree of accuracy and bias in metaperceptions of liking and desire for future contact following unstructured social interactions with new acquaintances and tested how depression and self-esteem influence bias and accuracy in these judgments. Results indicated that depression and lower self-esteem are associated with negative directional biases but are also associated with lower reciprocity bias (the tendency to assume that partners return one’s feelings of liking and acceptance). In addition, individuals with lower self-esteem displayed greater meta-insight (accuracy when controlling for bias) compared with those with higher self-esteem. Implications for cognitive and depressive realism theories of depression are discussed.

How does the brain deal with the social world?

Neuroreport ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore ◽  
Uta Frith
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Brain

Moving between frames: The basis of the stable and dialogical self

2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 510-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Moore ◽  
Carol Jasper ◽  
Alex Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Dialogical Self ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Stability And Instability ◽  
The Social ◽  
Clear Link ◽  
The Stability

Research on the dialogical self has tended to emphasize instability over stability. Grossen and Salazar Orvig (2011) show how norms, values, material objects, and institutions feed into the stability of the self. We expand upon this contribution by introducing Goffman’s (1974) concept of “frames” to theorize both stability and instability. Social interactions do not begin with individuals but with socially given and pre-existing cultural-historical frames which people are called upon to inhabit. Frames comprise historical, institutional, material, and cultural aspects. The key point is that action within a frame tends to stabilize the self, while being caught between frames tends to destabilize the self. The concept of frames can thus provide a clear link between the structure of the social world and the structure of the dialogical self. We use the concept of frames to distinguish the stability produced by one set of expectations, within one frame, from the peculiar instability and dialogical tensions which result from being embedded in discrepant or contradictory frames.

scholarly journals Self-other representation in the social brain reflects social connection

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea L. Courtney ◽  
Meghan L. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Connection ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Brain

Social connection is critical to well-being, yet how the brain reflects our attachment to other people remains largely unknown. We combined univariate and multivariate brain imaging analyses to assess whether and how the brain organizes representations of others based on how connected they are to our own identity. During an fMRI scan, participants (N=43) completed a self- and other-reflection task for 16 targets: the self, five close others, five acquaintances, and five celebrities. In addition, they reported their subjective closeness to each target and their own trait loneliness. We examined neural responses to the self and others in a brain region that has been associated with self-representation (medial prefrontal cortex; MPFC) and across the whole brain. The structure of self-other representation in the MPFC and across the social brain appeared to cluster targets into three social categories: the self, social network members (including close others and acquaintances), and celebrities. Moreover, both univariate activation in MPFC and multivariate self-other similarity in MPFC and across the social brain increased with subjective self-other closeness ratings. Critically, participants who were less socially connected (i.e. lonelier) showed altered self-other mapping in social brain regions. Most notably, in MPFC, loneliness was associated with reduced representational similarity between the self and others. The social brain apparently maintains information about broad social categories as well as closeness to the self. Moreover, these results point to the possibility that feelings of chronic social disconnection may be mirrored by a ‘lonelier’ neural self-representation.Significance StatementSocial connection is critical to well-being, yet how the brain reflects our attachment to people remains unclear. We found that the social brain stratifies neural representations of people based on our subjective connection to them, separately clustering people who are and are not in our social network. Moreover, the people we feel closest to are represented most closely to ourselves. Finally, lonelier individuals also appeared to have a ‘lonelier’ neural self-representation in the MPFC, as loneliness attenuated the closeness between self and other neural representations in this region. The social brain appears to map our interpersonal ties, and alterations in this map may help explain why lonely individuals endorse statements such as ‘people are around me but not with me’.

Mind Shift

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Parrington
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Brain Function ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Cellular Level ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Brain

This book draws on the latest research on the human brain to show how it differs strikingly from those of other animals in its structure and function at molecular and cellular level. It argues that this ‘shift’, enlarging the brain, giving it greater flexibility and enabling higher functions such as imagination, was driven by tool use, but especially by the development of one remarkable tool—language. The complex social interaction brought by language opened up the possibility of shared conceptual worlds, enriched with rhythmic sounds and images that could be drawn on cave walls. This transformation enabled modern humans to generate an exceptional human consciousness, a sense of self that arises as a product of our brain biology and the social interactions we experience. Linking early work by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky to the findings of modern neuroscience, the book also explores how language, culture, and society mediate brain function, and what this view of the human mind may bring to our understanding and treatment of mental illness.

scholarly journals Asymmetries of the human social brain in the visual, auditory and chemical modalities

2008 ◽  
Vol 364 (1519) ◽  
pp. 895-914 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfredo Brancucci ◽  
Giuliana Lucci ◽  
Andrea Mazzatenta ◽  
Luca Tommasi
Keyword(s):  
Impression Formation ◽  
General Pattern ◽  
Neural Substrates ◽  
Social World ◽  
Hemispheric Lateralization ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Behavioural Characteristics ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Neuroimaging Techniques

Structural and functional asymmetries are present in many regions of the human brain responsible for motor control, sensory and cognitive functions and communication. Here, we focus on hemispheric asymmetries underlying the domain of social perception, broadly conceived as the analysis of information about other individuals based on acoustic, visual and chemical signals. By means of these cues the brain establishes the border between ‘self’ and ‘other’, and interprets the surrounding social world in terms of the physical and behavioural characteristics of conspecifics essential for impression formation and for creating bonds and relationships. We show that, considered from the standpoint of single- and multi-modal sensory analysis, the neural substrates of the perception of voices, faces, gestures, smells and pheromones, as evidenced by modern neuroimaging techniques, are characterized by a general pattern of right-hemispheric functional asymmetry that might benefit from other aspects of hemispheric lateralization rather than constituting a true specialization for social information.

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