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Samenvatting Social Neuroscience A
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Voorbeeld 3 van de 24 pagina's
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Chapter 1 Introduction to social neuroscienceThe emergence of social neuroscience
Allport (1968) defined social psychology as ‘an attempt to understand and explain how the
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or
implied presence of others’. By extension a reasonable working definition of social
neuroscience would be ‘an attempt to understand and explain, using neural mechanisms,
how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual,
imagined, or implied presence of others’. Based on this definition, one could regard social
neuroscience as being a subdiscipline within social psychology that is distinguished only by
its adherence to neuroscientific methods and/or theories. Whilst this may be perfectly true,
most researchers working within the field of social neuroscience do not have backgrounds
within social psychology but tend to be drawn from the fields of cognitive psychology and
neuroscience.
Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as thinking, perceiving,
speaking, acting, and planning. It has an important role to play in social neuroscience
because it aims to decompose complex social behaviors into simpler mechanisms that are
amenable for exploration using neuroscientific methodologies. Social neuroscience links
together all these disciplines: linking cognitive and social psychology, and linking ‘mind’ with
brain.
The social brain?
One overarching issue within social neuroscience is the extent to which the so-called ‘social
brain’ can be considered distinct from all the other functions that the brain carries out. In
other words, is the ‘social brain’ special in any way?
One possibility is that there are particular neural substrates in the brain that are involved in
social cognition but not in other types of cognitive processing. This relates to the notions of
modularity and domain specificity. A module is the term given to a computational routine that
responds to particular inputs and performs a particular computation on them, that is, a
routine that is highly specialized in terms of what it does to what. One core property that has
been attributed to modules is domain specificity, namely that the module processes only one
kind of input. In this modular view, the social brain is special by virtue of brain mechanisms
that are specifically dedicated to social processes.
The alternative, diametrically opposite, approach is to argue that the ‘social brain’ is not, in
fact, specialized uniquely for social behavior but is also involved in non-social aspects of
cognition. However, there are other positions that lie in-between these two extremes.
Another possibility is that it is not particular regions of the social brain that are ‘special’ but
rather that there are particular kinds of neural mechanisms especially suited to social
processes. For example, Frith (2007) claims: ‘I have speculated about the role of various
components of the social brain, but in most cases, I believe that these processes are not
specifically social. The exception is the brain’s mirror system.’ Mirror neurons respond both
when an animal sees an action performed by someone else and when they perform the
same action themselves. The key insight, with regard to social neuroscience, is that there
may be a simple mechanism - implemented at the level of single neurons - that enables a
correspondence between self and other. Mirror neurons have been implicated in imitation,
empathy, and ‘mind reading’. Whereas some researchers have argued that mirror neurons
serve a specific social function, others have suggested that they arise primarily out of
,associative learning between action and perception in both social and non-social contexts
such as observing one’s own actions.
Is neuroscience an appropriate level of explanation for studying social behavior?
Perhaps the most general criticism that could be leveled at social neuroscience is that the
brain is not the most appropriate level of explanation for understanding social processes.
Surely social processes need to be studied and understood at the social level - that is, at the
level of interactions between people, groups of people, and societies.
Of course, this presents a distorted view of what social neuroscience is really all about. Most
researchers in the field do not take a strongly reductionist approach. Reductionism implies
that one type of explanation will become replaced with another, more basic, type of
explanation over time. In a reductionist framework the language of social psychology will be
replaced by the concepts of neuroscience. However, most researchers in social
neuroscience are attempting to create bridges between different levels of explanation rather
than replace one kind of explanation with another. For example, social neuroscience studies
may combine questionnaire measures with neuroscience data.
Another common way in which neuroscience data are used to bridge levels of explanation
has been termed the reverse inference approach. This is an attempt to infer the nature of
cognitive processes from neuroscience data. For example, activity within the amygdala may
be taken to imply the involvement of a fear-related mechanism in studies of race processing.
The nature of various moral dilemmas has been inferred on the basis of whether the
dilemmas activate regions of the brain implicated in emotion or in higher order reasoning.
The reliability of this inference depends on what is known about the functions of given
regions.
Logically, there is one scenario in which brain-based data could have no significant impact
on our understanding of social processes, and that is the blank slate scenario. In the blank
slate scenario. the brain just accepts, stores, and processes whatever information is given to
it without any pre-existing biases, limitations, or knowledge. According to the blank slate, the
brain is not completely redundant but the nature of social interactions themselves is entirely
attributable to culture, society, and the environment. A more realistic scenario is that the
brain, and its underlying processes, creates constraints on social processes.
Gene-culture co-evolution
One good illustrative attempt at linking multiple levels of explanation in social neuroscience
comes from a newly coined sub-discipline termed cultural neuroscience. Cultural
neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field bridging cultural psychology, neurosciences, and
neurogenetics that explains how neurobiological processes give rise to cultural values,
practices, and beliefs as well as how culture shapes neurobiological processes. That is, it
explicitly assumes that not only will cultural differences influence the brain but also that the
brain will impact on culture itself. The scope of cultural neuroscience encompasses such
things as examining how immersion in different cultural systems affects the functioning of
different brain networks, and also how differences in biology might be linked to cultural
practice. Perhaps not surprisingly, there has been some healthy skepticism to this approach.
According to the principle of gene-culture co-evolution certain genotypes may predispose
people to create particular features in their environment and - at the same time - aspects of a
given culture may tend to favor individuals of a given genotype. The outcome of this iterative
process is that there is a good fit between a particular genotype and a particular cultural
, practice. A commonly cited example is the genetic disposition to lactose tolerance and the
cultural practice of cattle domestication and dairy farming.
More recently, researchers have investigated the prevalence of various genetic subtypes
linked to social sensitivity in cultures that vary in their degree of individualism and
collectivism. There is evidence that genes linked to increased social sensitivity are more
prevalent in collectivist cultures, whereas genes linked to reduced social sensitivity are more
prevalent in individualist cultures. One possible conclusion is that genes and culture have
co-evolved.
There is an obvious, and hard to disprove, criticism of these findings: namely that the
evidence is all correlational in nature. However, the fact that the pattern occurs across
multiple genes that convey social sensitivity makes it unlikely to be a chance occurrence. If
true, it suggests that differences at the lowest level of analysis in neuroscience interact with
the highest level of analysis in social psychology - albeit interacting over multi-generational
timescales.
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