Social Neuroscience: Toward Understanding the Underpinnings of the Social Mind

The field of social cognitive neuroscience has been at the forefront of study for many psychologists over the past decade or so. Much of the spur for this new field has come from the development of functional neuro-imaging techniques, making possible unobtrusive measurement of brain activation over time. Now we are able to ask such questions as: are there regions of the brain in the inferior temporal cortex dedicated to face processing? There are many other such intractable questions that we can ask now that we could not even imagine asking thirty years ago. This book is interested in questions such as: How do we understand and represent other people? How do we represent social groups? How do we regulate our emotions and offer socially undesirable responses? This book is divided into four sections. The first deals with understanding and representing other people. The second deals with representing social groups. The third section deals with the interplay of cognition and emotion in social regulation. The final section considers a range of questions that have emerged in the context of social neuroscience research.