Summary Social Neuroscience (for MC exam chapters 8-11)
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Module
Social Neuroscience (422093B6)
Institution
Tilburg University (UVT)
Book
The Student\'s Guide to Social Neuroscience
Summary of Social Neuroscience for the third MC exam of chapter 8-11. I summarised the YouTube videos of Jamie Ward (except from chapter 11, because that doesn't have a video) and added information from the textbook! Very precise and extensive!!
Social Neuroscience - Key Terms ALL chapters 1-11 from the book 'The Student’s Guide to Social Neuroscience'
Social Neuroscience - Key Terms chapters 8-11 from the book 'The Student’s Guide to Social Neuroscience'
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Tilburg University (UVT)
Psychology [EN]
Social Neuroscience (422093B6)
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Summary Social Neuroscience – YouTube videos + book (= blue text)
Chapter 8 – Relationships
What is a relationship?
- Attachment, affection, intimacy, more emotional bond
- Typically: friends, family and a romantic partner
- A series of interactions with the same individual does not constitute a relationship
- Shopkeeper suddenly not there, might show a relationship
- Defined psychologically in terms of:
- Distress and longing in separation (grief being an extreme example)
- Sense of well-being in their presence
- Also known as ‘social bonds’
- Attachment being a particularly intense type of social bond, normally reserved for
close family and long-term romantic partners
= Hypothetical links between known people that induce a sense of happiness or
well-being in the presence of the bonded other and a sense of wanting or longing
(perhaps even distress) in their absence
- Trust is important neural mechanism for establishing a social bond
Why do relationships matter?
- Affiliation is associated with positive affect and absence of affiliation is a powerful
motivator to connect with others
- Benefits for health:
- Social support protects against cardio-vascular, immune and endocrine disease
- Stress hormones have affect on your body
- Loneliness and lack of intimacy associated with greater cognitive decline in the
elderly
- How lonely you feel rather than how many people you spoken today
- Benefits over evolutionary time:
- Promotes group cohesiveness (over pure self interest); nurturing of the young, etc.;
all of which have survival benefits
- About sex and looking after your family
- Without sex, not passing your genes
Love
= The emotion that is associated with being in an attachment relationship
- Not normally considered a ‘basic emotion’ although it has some of these properties
- Serves particular functions (e.g. parental care, sexual behaviour)
- Has a distinct neural subtrate/neural biological mechanism behind it
- Love is not associated with a facial expression
- Can be ascribed (= toeschrijven) an evolutionary function
1
,Different kinds of love
Sternbergs’ triangular theory
= An explanation of love in terms of a combination of three factors (passion, intimacy, and
commitment)
- Love consists of three factors
1. Passion: sexual attraction
2. Commitment: desire, wanting to see things through, I owe it to you, resolve to
maintain the relationship through difficulty
3. Intimacy: sharing thoughts and so on, feelings of warmth and closeness
Differ from relationship to relationship
- Types of loves have to do with if you have these three factors
- Infatuation: passion but no commitment or intimacy
- In love with pop star
- Intense attraction
- Empty love: no passion or intimacy, but commitment
- Arranged marriages
- Companionate love: commitment and intimacy without passion
- Importance of factors may change over time, or differ from relationship to relationship
- Passionate phase lasts 6 months to 3 years (how long it would take to conceive and nurturing
after)
- Sexual part of relationships
- Other factors may ensure continuation after this phase (intimacy, costs of leaving, etc.)
- Arranged marriages are high on ‘commitment’ factor but other factors may increase over
time (through mutual respect and shared experiences)
- Three factors that maintain commitment (Adams & Jones, 1997)
1. Personal dedication: due to ongoing positive feelings towards the partner
2. Moral obligation: due to social norms or religious/cultural beliefs
3. Costs versus benefits of leaving: financial and emotional costs; availability of an
alternative relationship
Neuroscience and love
- Bartels & Zeki (2000, 2004)
- fMRI studies comparing viewing of a loved one (mother, partner)/own child vs
acquaintance (friend)/acquainted child (maternal love)
- Showing photographs
- Activity in reward-related regions linked to oxytocin/vasopressin when looking at
images of loved ones
- Hormone effect various organs in body
- Deactivation in regions such as amygdala, TPJ and medial PFC (‘mentalizing
regions’)
- Activation more when you see a friend than when you see a loved one
Suggest reward in the absence of critical social assessment of others
(unconditional love?)
- Take some things for granted for a loved one that you would not for a
friend
- Master et al (2009)
- Love acts as a buffer against stress and pain
- When viewing a negative film then people who are in early stages of love
show less autonomic reactivity than single people
2
, - Looking at photograph of partner, stranger or object OR holding hand with partner,
stranger or holding an object
- Getting a mild electric shock at the same time
- Pain subjectively less painful with partner reward circuit makes
pain less painful
- Related to activity in nucleus accumbens
- Similar behavioural results are found when the participant held their partner’s hand
(but could not see him) relative to holding the hand of a stranger or squeezing a ball
Falling in love
- Similarity with clinical symptoms (euphoria, obsessive thoughts about loved one, etc.)
- This need not reflect clinical disturbance, but may be an important biological
mechanism that enables us to put aside inhibitions and abandon our comfort zones
- Hormonal and neurochemical changes associated only with the (early) passionate phase of a
relationship
- Testosterone levels in males: reduction when in love
- Opposite for females
- Temporary change involved around initial falling in love
- Return to normal 12-18 months later, even when maintaining the same
relationship
- Plasma oxytocin levels are high in initial stages of romantic love and correlate both with
signs of affection and also relationship-related worries
- Serotonin measured in blood stream: letting yourself go, setting aside inhibitions
- Lower in passionate phase
- OCD patients have more
- What factors determine whom we fall in love with?
- Proximity: provides opportunity to contact
- Familiarity: people are more liked when they are seen more often
- Physical attractiveness
- Attractiveness of potential partner relative to one’s own perceived
attractiveness
- Matching hypothesis: states that people are more likely to form long-
standing relationships with those who are equally physically attractive
as they are
- Similarity of attitudes
- Reciprocal liking: if you are told that someone likes you then you are more likely to
like them
Attachment
= A process, neurobiological mechanism/A powerful type of social bond that tends to be
limited to particular kinds of relationships (e.g. infant-parent, romantic partners)
- Found in all animals in which infants initially in need of care (e.g. imprinting in birds
first moving object think that it’s their mother)
- Imprinting = the process by which animals (particularly birds) recognize and seek
proximity with a mother figure)
- Narrow window of opportunity to imprint: between 15 hours and 3 days
- Term initially used for parent-infant bonds, but now encompasses bonds between sexual
partners
3
, - Also parents attached to infants and for falling in love
- Quite similar when it comes to hormones and neural circuits
Attachment in infancy
- Mother is normally the first (and strongest) attachment relationships
- Tends to emerge at 7-8 months
- Attachment is assessed objectively in terms of some measure of separation distress (e.g.
crying) or proximity-seeking behaviour (e.g. attempting to follow or reach out to the adult)
- Behaviourist tradition: love and attachment are a learned response to having one’s needs met
- You give me food, care
- Work by Harlow: on monkeys
- Separate from mother
- Seek comfort from artificial monkeys: from wire and providing milk from bottle or
cuddly
- Attached to something nice to hold on to choose cuddly monkey who
provides no milk
- Bowlby: on humans
- Separate from parents, mother is special because she is around a lot: an innate
disposition for need for care and protection
Pure psychological need
- Human infants have multiple attachments
- Mother dominates as attachment figure at the start
- Later on much more people
Neuroscience of parent-infant attachment
- Virtuous cycle See Figure 8.8, page 243 in book
- Infants who are securely attached become parents who provide healthy secure attachment
- Cross-generational transfer of behaviour
- Parent: increased reward response to viewing a child
- Oxytocin (involved in bonding) go up as you become a parent
- Involved in giving birth/labor as well
- Reward related learning mechanism
- Sound of parents’ infant crying still activity in reward related center
- Varies on quality of attachment
- Motivational, respond to it as result of more empathic reaction rather than
frustration-based response
- Mothers viewing an infant’s face activates reward related regions (VTA (= ventral tegmental
area) ventral striatum, including nucleus accumbens OFC)
- Same is true in fathers and women without children (depending on perceived
‘cuteness’)
- In fathers, individual differences in parenting level and style are related to circulating levels
of testosterone
- High testosterone linked to less involvement
- Relative size of men’s testicles: the bigger the testicle, the less rewarding you find it to look
at an infant
- Rewards greater for men with smaller testicles
- Motivated by work in animals where you can’t do fMRI
4
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