NESBED Live Lecture Week 1: Social Neuroscience Overview

Live Lecture: Social Neuroscience Overview

1. Multidisciplinary Approach:
   - Sociology, psychology, neuroscience
   - Martin Luther King's quote emphasizing the importance of diverse perspectives to understand prejudice.

2. Sociology:
   - Study of social behavior, origins, development, organizations, networks, and institutions.
   - Recognition of in-group favoritism and inherent prejudice.

3. (Social) Psychology:
   - Explores individual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
   - Examines phenomena like dehumanization to understand motivations and emotions underlying prejudice.

4. Neuroscience:
   - Studies behavior by examining brain circuitry.
   - Example: Oxytocin's role in bonding but also potential for reinforcing racist stereotypes.
   - Social neuroscience aims to integrate biology, individual psychology, and group sociology.

5. The Social Brain: Modular or Non-Modular?
   - Discussion on whether the social brain functions through specialized routines or a more integrated, non-modular approach.
   - Consideration of the triune brain model, highlighting reptilian, mammalian, and primate brain components.

6. Evolution and the Triune Brain:
   - Bigger brains influencing both social and non-social intelligence.
   - Social intelligence hypothesis: Pressure to outwit peers leading to increased intelligence in non-social domains.
   - Social and non-social cognition interdependent.

7. Brain Evolution:
   - Triune brain model overview, highlighting reptilian, mammalian, and primate brain structures.
   - Mirror neurons as a social mechanism for observational learning.

8. Mixed Mode of the Social Brain:
   - Parts may be modular, module-like, or non-modular, depending on specific functions.
   - Advocacy for a network approach rather than assigning discrete social functions to specific brain regions.

9. Electrical Connections and Neuromodulators:
   - Action potentials for motion, more diffuse for emotion.
   - Role of neurotransmitters (glutamate, GABA) and neuromodulators (norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine) in emotion.

10. Autonomous Nervous System:
    - Rest and digest vs. fight or flight balance.
    - Hypothalamus regulation and its connection to emotional states.

11. Motivation and Emotion:
    - Distinction between motivation (reward seeking and punishment avoidance) and emotion.
    - Approach/avoidance actions and subjective liking/disliking.

12. Theories of Emotion:
    - James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, Papez and Maclean, and Schachter & Singer models.
    - Body and brain connection in emotional states.

13. Basic and Complex Emotions:
    - Exploration of basic emotions (fear, happy) across cultures.
    - Evolutionary perspective on emotions with dedicated neural substrates.
    - Introduction of complex social emotions like guilt, pride, and jealousy.