Social Neuroscience provides an updated and critically important survey of contemporary social neuroscience research. In response to recent advances in the field, this book speaks to the various ways that basic biological functions shape and underlie social behavior. The book also shows how an understanding of neuroscience, physiology, genetics, and endocrinology can foster a fuller, more consilient understanding of social behavior and of the person. These collected chapters cover traditional and contemporary social psychology topics that have received conceptual and empirical attention from social neuroscience approaches. While the focus of the chapters is demonstrating how social neuroscience methods contribute to understanding social psychological topics, they also cover a wide range of social neuroscience methods, including hormones, functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, event-related brain potentials, cardiovascular responses, and genetics.

Table of Contents

1 A Brief Overview of Social Neuroscience: Biological Perspectives on Social Psychology

2 Perceiving Persons: Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approaches

3 Persuasion Neuroscience: New Potential to Test Dual-process Theories

4 Mentalizing

5 Three Questions about the Neural Basis of Self

6 The Neuroscience of "Ego Depletion": How the Brain Can Help us Understand why Self-control Seems Limited

7 Existential Neuroscience: A Review and Outlook for the Case of Death Awareness

8 Oxytocin Conditions Human Group Psychology

9 Sex, Love, Temptation: Human Mating Motives and the Hormones that Underlie them

10 The Biological Perspective on Intergroup Relations

11 Neural Correlates of Social Pain

12 A Review of Social Neuroscience Research on Anger and Aggression

13 Cultural Neuroscience: Bridging Cultural and Biological Sciences

Review

A comprehensive sample of the most productive social neuroscience research programs, this volume is a go-to resource for expert and novice alike.

-Susan T. Fiske, Eugene Higgins Professor, Psychology & Public Affairs, Princeton University

In the crowded field of social neuroscience it is a high bar to achieve a resource book that provides comprehensive, contemporary, and accessible information. Social Neuroscience doesn’t just meet that high bar, it stares down at the abyss to glimpse the bar far below. Spanning measures from electrical signals in the brain to sweaty palms to chemical signals coursing through the body, this book covers the essential biology, but links to the mind are the primary focus. Exploring topics from love, sex, and temptation to conflict, frustration, and hate and everything in between, this book provides the quintessential resource for every student and scholar who seeks to understand the mind-brain connection.

-Wendy Berry Mendes, PhD, Sarlo-Ekman Professor of Emotion, UC San Francisco

In a rich baker's dozen of scholarly chapters, Social Neuroscience comes to life through luminaries in the field. Its integrations of existential social processes and brain dynamics reflect a giant step in our scientific understanding of human behavior, based on deep mammalian foundations. This is must-read for all who aspire to a deeper understanding of our uniquely social human brains and the cognitive complexities that arise from our underlying animalian-emotional nature.

-Jaak Panksepp, Professor and Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science, Washington State University

About the Authors

Eddie Harmon-Jones is Professor of Psychology at The University of New South Wales. In 2012, he received the Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. He is an associate editor of the journals Psychological Science and Emotion.

Michael Inzlicht is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. In 2015, he received the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology for his work on the emotive foundations of self-control. He is an associate editor at the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.