Attending to and neglecting people: bridging neuroscience, psychology and sociology

Abstract

One contribution of 15 to a theme issue 'Attending to and neglecting people'. Human behaviour is context-dependent-based on predictions and influenced by the environment and other people. We live in a dynamic world where both the social stimuli and their context are constantly changing. Similar dynamic, natural stimuli should, in the future, be increasingly used to study social brain functions, with parallel development of appropriate signal-analysis methods. Understanding dynamic neural processes also requires accurate time-sensitive characterization of the behaviour. To go beyond the traditional stimulus-response approaches, brain activity should be recorded simultaneously from two interacting subjects to reveal why human social interaction is critically different from just reacting to each other. This theme issue on Attending to and neglecting people contains original work and review papers on person perception and social interaction. The articles cover research from neuroscience, psychology, robotics, animal interaction research and microsociology. Some of the papers are co-authored by scientists who presented their own, independent views in the recent Attention and Performance XXVI conference but were brave enough to join forces with a colleague having a different background and views. In the future, information needs to converge across disciplines to provide us a more holistic view of human behaviour, its interactive nature, as well as the temporal dynamics of our social world.

Brain-to-brain coupling during handholding is associated with pain reduction

“…However, although traditional research on shared pain implies that the target of the pain and the observer undergo simultaneous activation, research to date has been based on a "singleperson" approach. This approach involves an artificial environment in which a single isolated human response is simplified and analyzed, but it does not consider the additional element involved in social interaction per se and therefore does not allow testing real-time brain coupling between target and observer (39). Researchers have increasingly acknowledged that pain is affected by multidimensional factors.…”

Brain and behavioral alterations in subjects with social anxiety dominated by empathic embarrassment

“…Along with previous studies (15,17), the ventral and dorsal mPFC, PCC/precuneus, and pSTS/TPJ were more strongly involved during cogEMP than affEMP, whereas the anterior insula, inferior frontal gyrus, premotor cortex, STS, and cerebellum were more prominently involved during affEMP than cogEMP. One potential explanation for these differences is differential involvement of mentalization (15,17) and motormirroring (48) in cognitive and affective empathy.…”

With love, from me to you: Embedding social interactions in affective neuroscience

“…In fact, a report from a National Science Foundation workshop on mapping and engineering the brain has identified neuroimaging in interactive and naturalistic environments as one of three grand challenges in mapping the human brain (He et al, 2013). At the same time a Frontiers Research Topic (Pfeiffer et al, 2013) has brought together over 50 contributions addressing this issue from multiple perspectives and just recently a special themed issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Hari et al, 2016) added 15 more contributions, all attempting to shed some light on what has been termed the "dark matter" of social neuroscience.…”