Foundations in Social Neuroscience (Social Neuroscience) (Social Neuroscience Series)

Bys: John T. Cacioppo, Gary G. Berntson, Shelley E. Taylor, et al.

Book Overview

A full understanding of the biology and behavior of humans cannot be complete without the collective contributions of the social sciences, cognitive sciences, and neurosciences. This book collects eighty-two of the foundational articles in the emerging discipline of social neuroscience. The book addresses five main areas of research: multilevel integrative analyses of social behavior, using the tools of neuroscience, cognitive science, and social science to examine specific cases of social interaction; the relationships between social cognition and the brain, using noninvasive brain imaging to document brain function in various social situations; rudimentary biological mechanisms for motivation, emotion, and attitudes, and the shaping of these mechanisms by social factors; the biology of social relationships and interpersonal processes; and social influences on biology and health.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 026253195X
• ISBN13: 9780262531955
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Bradford Books
• Length: 1345 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.0" x 2.5" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Slosh

It isn't that they shouldn't, but some words, posed as category mistakes, don't seem to go together. For instances, consider waves and particles, "genomic environment" or, as is the case in the title under review, "social neuroscience." These odd couples seem to grind against each other, as if repelled to opposite places in long established categories like tectonic plates whose shifting juxtaposition shambles an established order. This antonymic phenomenon highlights a problem that has confronted science-makers stretching back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle and on to Descartes, Popper, and contemporary philosophers of science. The problem is this. To study, we take things apart, introducing vast vocabularies of particularization. To understand more comprehensively, we put these particulars back together, meshing, overlapping, integrating, and harmonizing the cacophony of disciplinary vocabularies. These are not either/or processes. It was so much easier in thought networks like those of the Zuni who saw ever so clearly that there was no such distinction between a wave and the sea itself. They called it "slosh." FOUNDATIONS IN SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE is a hefty volume (1357 pages) demonstrating that neuroscience is now old enough to be married to human adaptive experience. Like the Zuni word "slosh" it reminds us that nature abhors boundaries as well as vacuums. FOUNDATIONS evidences meaningful synthesis and integration, working up and down the conceptual ladder from the micro to the macro and back again. Transduction processes are explicated from mRNA to hormonal development to tactile comforting to social capital and then back to mRNA, as environmental circumstances feed forward and back to affect neurophysiological and neurochemical ones in the ongoing dynamics of human adaptation. FOUNDATIONS IN SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE is also, in a sense, a birth announcement of a novel interdiscipline. This is concretized in a very unusual arrangement, the kind one comes to expect from The University of Chicago, where John T. Cacioppo, the first listed editor of this volume, is the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor, Director of the Social Psychology Program AND Director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. Other editors include Gary G. Berntson, Ralph Adolphs, C. Sue Carter and eight others whose names are a Who's Who in the biological and social sciences. Thus FOUNDATIONS might well be called the bible of this newly emerging integrative program, with newer testaments added by professors Cacioppo and Berntson and colleagues more recently. (Cf. J.T. Cacioppo & G.G. Berntson, Eds., ESSAYS IN SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004; J.T. Cacioppo & G.G. Berntson, Eds.. SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE: KEY READINGS. New York: Psychology Press, 2004; J.T. Cacioppo, P.S. Visser, & C.L. Pickett, Eds.. SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE: PEOPLE THINKING ABOUT THINKING PEOPLE. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. A short list of FOUND

A fascinating collection of articles

Which brain mechanisms are involved in the typical social interactions that humans engage in everyday life? To what extent are these interactions determined by the dynamical processes in the human brain? Are there separate areas or modules in the brain responsible for these interactions, and what happens when these modules become dysfunctional? These questions, along with many more, are addressed in this collection of articles, which are written for experts in cognitive neuroscience. However, non-experts, such as this reviewer, can profit from a perusal of the articles, even if they have only an understanding of the basic rudiments of cognitive neuroscience. Only twenty-six of these articles were read by this reviewer, and for lack of space just a few of these will be reviewed here. The article entitled "Neural Correlates of Theory-of-Mind Reasoning: An Event-Related Potential Study", is an attempt to find the neural system that is behind reasoning about mental states. Such a finding is deemed important by the authors of this article, since an impairment of this system may result in autism. They quote research that is suggestive of the idea that the ability to think about mental representations of reality, such as beliefs, is not correlated with the ability to think about other kinds of representations of reality, such as photographs. Autistic individuals have trouble with the former but not with the latter. The authors outline experimental tests that illustrate these differences, and also discuss experiments that show that autistic individuals show greater impairment for left-hemispheric tasks. The implications of these studies for a modularized theory of mind is discussed in some detail, and they conclude these studies give evidence for the assertion that neurophysiological abnormalities in autistic individuals is related to deficits in their social cognitive abilities. For this reviewer, the most interesting article in the book is the one entitled "Attention, Self-Regulation, and Consciousness", which as the name implies, addresses the study of consciousness. The scientific study of consciousness is finally being taken seriously by cognitive neuroscientists, and this article gives a good example of this. The authors concentrate on the voluntary control of the mental processes that are responsible for the regulation of behavior and thought. They clearly have no qualms at being at odds with entrenched philosophical notions of consciousness and voluntary control. The neuronal system that is responsible for the regulation of thought, emotion, and behavior, is, in their view, one that consists of the midfrontal cortical areas and the underlying basal ganglia. This system has been called the `executive network' by cognitive neuroscientists, and is active for tasks involving selection, conflict, and error detection. The authors discuss various experiments that were conducted to investigate the brain mechanisms behind these three tasks. For selec