Social Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field that uses insights from the social sciences and neurosciences to investigate the fundamentals of human social and emotional behaviour. At the core of Social Neuroscience lies the observation that social behaviour is always a combination of social-cognitive and social-affective processes. As a result, the themes studied in Social Neuroscience are endless; recognition/interpretation of social and emotional events, social stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination, social communication and trust, social empathy and perspective taking, morality, social aggression and fear, self-regulation and impulse control, recognition of other people's and one’s own intentions, self-recognition and awareness, socio-economic decision-making behaviour, risk and gambling behaviour, human–robot and human–ai interaction, etc..
In the 20th century, biological and social explanations for human behaviour were often deemed to be incompatible. However, recent developments in social and biological sciences have led to the foundation of Social Neuroscience, a field that attempts to integrate knowledge from these two fields in order to develop new biologically-constraint insights and predictions for social behaviour, to ultimately also offer points of reference for altering social behaviours that are unhealthy for the individual or society. This interdisciplinary approach provides Social Neuroscience with inherent application-oriented relevance for many other fields, including Economics, (micro)Sociology, Law and Political Sciences. Globally, Social Neuroscience is one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields of science.
Social Neuroscience studies social behaviour from the perspective of an evolutionary 'social brain' and tries to link important socio-emotional behaviours and misbehaviours not only to specific areas of the brain and their communication, but also to neurotransmission and hormonal processes. The relationship between social behaviour and the social brain is classified in terms of a framework pertaining to so-called bottom-up subcortically-controlled and top-down cortically-controlled processes. The bottom-up processes are the social-affective processes that are controlled reflexively by subcortical and limbic emotional-motivational structures, whilst the social-cognitive processes are more reflective and are dominated by top-down-controlled cortical mechanism structures. Over the course of this Minor you will also learn how to fuse this approach with model-based/model-free and prediction-error driven accounts of (human) brain-functioning as applied in Computational Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence.
The analysis and integration of biophysical and behavioural processes forms an important part of Social Neuroscience. Within social neuroscientific research, behavioural paradigms are therefore used that allow interpretations from a neuroscientific perspective using methods such as neuroimaging, neurostimulation, neurophysiology, computational modelling, cross-species comparisons, and hormonal/pharmacological manipulation. Over the course of this Minor you will learn about these methods and will get the chance to use (some of) them in practice to study the relation between the brain and social behaviour.
