Perhaps not since the flowering of clinical neuropsychology thirty years ago have we seen this sense of exhilaration about the emergence of a new field through the integration of existing disciplines. Clearly, these authors and thinkers feel the same excitement that could be felt when new collaborations were being forged among neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and communication specialists in earlier decades. For the emerging field of social neuroscience, the parent fields include social psychology (see, for example, chapters on Race and Emotion, The Social Neuroscience of Stereotyping and Prejudice, Social and Physical Pain, and Animal Models of Human Attitudes), clinical neuropsychology (Neurological Substrates of Emotional and Social Intelligence: Evidence from Patients with Focal Brain Lesions), social cognition (Neural Substrates of Self Awareness, and three chapters bearing directly on Theory of Mind) and, of course, cognitive and basic neuroscience. Each chapter includes theoretical perspectives from multiple fields and reviews studies that use diverse techniques (including functional imaging, ERP, behavioral scales, lesion studies, developmental studies, and animal studies), although the book is very heavy on functional imaging data. As the editors acknowledge, animal and patient data are not represented in a thorough way.
This volume is one in a social neuroscience series edited by John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson that includes Foundations in Social Neuroscience and Essays in Social Neuroscience. In fact, it is one of a larger group of recent volumes on social neuroscience published in the last 10 years, but mostly in the last 5 years. All contain fascinating, cutting edge information, including attempts to define this new field, and this volume is no exception. As described by the editors, the volume focuses on the neurobiological underpinnings of social information processing. However, the title is a bit misleading, because it suggests a volume devoted to the neuroscience of theory of mind. In fact, theory of mind is covered in several fascinating chapters but other topics range widely, from theoretical treatises on the interpretation of functional imaging studies to several chapters on the neurobiology of prejudice. As discussed in Banaji's eloquent Foreword, and the editors' equally eloquent Preface, social neuroscience can refer to a huge range of behaviors and neural processes. Indeed, given how very social humans are, it could in theory refer to the study of what we do during most of our waking hours, because even ostensibly nonsocial activities may rest on ultimately social motivations.
Selecting specific chapter topics must have been difficult. The papers come out of a conference and the resulting volume has the usual drawbacks of such an arrangement: it is neither an organized overview of a field nor an in-depth treatment of a particular topic from multiple perspectives but a set of theoretically disparate chapters by stellar authors writing about what they know best. The book's strength is therefore not in its organization or exhaustive coverage of a new field (hardly possible any longer) or even exhaustive coverage of a particular area within this new field. Compare, for example, with The Neuroscience of Social Interaction: Decoding, Imitating, and Influencing the Actions of Others edited by Frith and Wolpert, which has more detailed discussions of specific topics, including multi-chapter sections on biological motion, imitation, and “mentalizing,” and Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science edited by Hurley and Chater, a fascinating two-volume work on imitation with even more detail on a particular subject. This book's strength lies in the quality of the separate chapters, each of which is truly outstanding. The chapters vary a bit in their readability (some are quite dense and could not be recommended for beginning graduate students, whereas many are very clearly written and easy to read), but they do not vary in the quality and recency of the literature reviewed; the theoretical depth of thinking; or the excitement, common to all, of pursuing work in a new and integrative field.
One theme touched on in almost all of the chapters is the extent to which neural processes underlying social information processing have evolved specifically for this purpose as opposed to being adapted from (or for) more general information processing mechanisms, a set of arguments that will be familiar to many from the language literature. The issue of specificity of social neural mechanisms is addressed in most chapters, and is central to several of them, with interestingly diverse conclusions being drawn. It is addressed directly in Adolphs's chapter, What is Special about Social Cognition?, and in Berntson's chapter, Reasoning about Brains, which also goes a bit afield in a fascinating discussion of how to make valid brain localization inferences and principles governing multi-level research, (e.g., genetic to cellular to anatomical to systems neuroscience and behavior).
A subtext of the book is theory behind functional imaging studies. Nusbaum and Small's chapter, Investigating Cortical Mechanisms of Language Processing in Social Context, (in addition to their more content-related discussion of why imaging studies of language should include more naturalistic processes and social contexts) has a thought-provoking critique of the subtractive and componential logic of typical fMRI studies. They emphasize the interdigitated nature of many cortical systems, also discussed at length at Berntson's introductory chapter. Raichle's concluding chapter, Social Neuroscience: A Perspective, focuses heavily on the development of neuroimaging and its likely future.
It is difficult to identify outstanding chapters in this uniformly excellent set of contributions. Mitchell et al. have a very readable chapter on theory of mind, impression formation, and neural systems that guide social behavior and self-awareness. They also directly attack the book's central question of whether social cognition relies on a discrete set of brain regions that are distinct from other mental processes. I particularly enjoyed Stone's discussion on the evolution of social cognition, especially theory of mind, in which she discusses underlying and precursor processes (in other mammals and in children) to adult human theory of mind capabilities and Saxe's nicely complementary analysis of what each activating brain region might contribute specifically to theory of mind processes. A set of chapters on how neuroscience and comparative studies (e.g. social learning in animals) is informing our understanding of prejudice, impression formation, perceptual distortion of members of out-groups, and related phenomena is also fascinating and quite sobering. Clinicians may be particularly interested in a chapter by Ochsner on affective evaluation and the amygdala, and how cognitive influences, such as attention or reappraisal, change subjective experience as well as the neural activation underpinning subjectively experienced affect. Although the implications of this work for cognitive therapy are not discussed, the work is clearly directly applicable to clinical interventions.
I will resist the temptation to mention all of the remaining chapters. There was not a single one that was not informative in its literature review and sophisticated and elegant in its theoretical interpretation. The fact that very different, even opposing, points of view are taken makes it even more fun to read. This will be great reading for anyone interested in a sampling of current thinking by leaders in social neuroscience.
