Social network analysis for social neuroscientists

Abstract

Although social neuroscience is concerned with understanding how the brain interacts with its social environment, prevailing research in the field has primarily considered the human brain in isolation, deprived of its rich social context. Emerging work in social neuroscience that leverages tools from network analysis has begun to pursue this issue, advancing knowledge of how the human brain influences and is influenced by the structures of its social environment. In this paper, we provide an overview of key theory and methods in network analysis (especially for social systems) as an introduction for social neuroscientists who are interested in relating individual cognition to the structures of an individual’s social environments. We also highlight some exciting new work as examples of how to productively use these tools to investigate questions of relevance to social neuroscientists. We include tutorials to help with practical implementation of the concepts that we discuss. We conclude by highlighting a broad range of exciting research opportunities for social neuroscientists who are interested in using network analysis to study social systems.

Popular individuals process the world in particularly normative ways

“…Therefore, in-degree centrality is not susceptible to erroneous perceptions of one's own friendships and is less susceptible to the mischaracterization of friendship ties due, for example, to any given participant's inattention during a survey or atypical interpretations of survey questions (because each participant's in-degree centrality is based on data that is aggregated across many other participants' responses). Additionally, indegree centrality is particularly suitable for our study because it is not affected by the presence of multiple components in a network, unlike most other measures of centrality (e.g., eigenvector centrality) 32 .…”

How do our brains support our real-life friendships?

“…Scientists can study a social network in many ways. Most typically, a social network is a collection of people who know each other and the relationships between those people [1,2]. Suppose that a researcher seeks to characterize a social network of your school based on friendship.…”

“…Is this person good at connecting people from different friendship groups? Scientists have shown that people's brains automatically process these different types of information when they see people who they know [1] (see Figure 2)! Why would your brain automatically do this?…”

“…Even though scientists have found that people in different social-network positions have brains that operate in different ways, they haven't yet discovered (1) if differences in the brain lead to people occupying particular social-network positions or (2) if occupying particular socialnetwork positions can cause changes in the brain [1]. Although these open issues are hard to resolve in humans because of both practical and ethical concerns, scientists have studied other animals (such as macaque monkeys) to gain some insights into them.…”

An Adaptive Routing Algorithm Based on Relation Tree in DTN

“…Traditional Internet networks are based on the TCP/IP protocol and rely on physical links that need to meet the characteristics of bidirectional, end-to-end continuous stability. However, as the research field continues to expand, more diverse and complex network environments have emerged, such as the interstellar Internet [ 1 ], social networks [ 2 ], vehicle-mounted networks [ 3 , 4 ], wireless sensor networks [ 5 ], and so on. In these networks, even if end-to-end transmission paths exist, they are relatively susceptible to interruptions, small data transfer rates, and long transmission delays.…”