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Advances in neuroimaging methods and techniques and interest in understanding the neural bases of psychological phenomena are rapidly changing how the capacity for self-control is being addressed. An approach dubbed Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) integrates research across multiple levels of analysis, leading to important findings that link the basic social, cognitive, and affective processes underlying self-control to their neural substrates. This chapter illustrates how a SCAN approach can be useful for addressing questions including the problem of how to enable researchers from different areas with different types of expertise and interests in self-control to communicate with one another and most effectively use each other’s (sometimes highly technical) theories and methods. Towards this end, we begin by describing the basic goals of SCAN and some of the key challenges facing researchers who adopt this approach. We then describe how this approach is currently being used to build an integrative understanding of the processes underlying a particular type of self-control process that involves actively reinterpreting the meaning of an emotionally evocative stimulus to meet and/or modulate ones’ feelings. We conclude by discussing important future research directions in this area.

This chapter provides a summary of what has been reviewed in this volume. It is all too common to hear in neuroscience and psychology that attention is a vague concept not amenable to a truly scientific explanation; or that, even if we did have an understanding of the mechanisms of attention, this would do little to illuminate the problems that arise in psychology or social neuroscience. The goal of this volume is to argue that both of these assertions are false. Although certainly there is much more to be learned, attention is an organ system and thus can be studied network by network, even though—as in all systems—there are interactions among the constituent parts. Attention networks have anatomical and functional independence, but they also interact in many practical situations. Damage to a node of these networks, irrespective of the source, produces distinctive neuropsychological deficits.

In the intergroup relations literature, theories of control concern the interplay of basic cognitive mechanisms of self-regulation with intrapersonal and societal-level goals and motivations. By integrating multiple levels of analysis, this literature has been uniquely positioned to advance our understanding of control as it operates in the complex social world that the human self-regulatory system has evolved to negotiate. In this chapter, we review research and theoretical models of control that have emerged from intergroup approaches. The first section of this chapter describes four theoretical models of control that have been central to research in prejudice, stereotyping, and intergroup relations. The next section highlights some of the recent exciting advances in the study of control in the intergroup domain and notes how they are refining and, in some cases, redefining basic conceptions of control as a self-regulatory process. The final section outlines what we see as some major challenges faced by current theories of control, both in the intergroup domain and in the broader psychological literature.

This chapter describes a social neuroscience framework of the processes through which racial biases are activated and controlled. It begins by reviewing the prevalent dual-process model of prejudice and stereotyping, and then describes some ways in which recent social neuroscience research has extended our understanding of the activation and regulation of intergroup bias. It shows that an expanded view of the basic dual-process model of prejudice that has dominated the field for nearly twenty years. Although the body of social neuroscience research on prejudice and stereotyping is still quite small, researchers have made efficient use of models developed in the larger cognitive and behavioral neuroscience literatures to inform social psychological questions.

Social neuroscience can be used to understand dehumanized perception, a failure to think about another person's mind (mentalizing). This extreme form of prejudice entails perceiving a person as less than, not quite, or not at all human. It is argued that dehumanized perception may be a psychological response to social targets who elicit the negative basic emotion disgust. The chapter reviews social neuroscience data showing that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)—an area implicated in mentalizing and social cognition—is not as active for these dehumanized targets as for other social targets. It then reviews subsequent social psychological predictions generated by the neural data; these data show that participants fail to think about the minds of these dehumanized targets to the same extent as other social targets. Participants also describe these dehumanized targets as ill-intentioned, inept, unfamiliar, dissimilar, strange, and not uniquely human or quite typically human. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some factors that may moderate dehumanized perception, perhaps relevant to the hope of reducing some of the thought processes and emotions that underlie human atrocities.

The representation of others is a central problem that brings social neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience together. Chapters 1–4 present an overview of the current state of our understanding for the neural systems that participate in the representation of others and highlight the major themes and issues that characterize this area of investigation. This chapter addresses why this particular problem is of great interest to both social and cognitive neuroscientists.

This chapter summarizes the discussions in Chapters 10–13. These chapters represent a broad range of approaches and questions in the social neuroscience of emotion. By doing this, they demonstrate how the interdisciplinary approach of social neuroscience can provide insight into important experimental and theoretical questions across a number of disciplines of human behavior.

The role of orbitofrontal cortex in emotional decision making has recently been called into question. Recent research that draws on both social psychological and neuroscience approaches (i.e., social neuroscience) suggests that orbitofrontal function may be better characterized as supporting self-insight. From this perspective, the orbitofrontal cortex may have only a distal influence on emotional decision making. Self-insight processes affect which emotions are generated, and these emotions affect subsequent decision making. This chapter argues that this research does not refute the theorized adaptive role of emotion in decision making. Instead, this research highlights the need to expand the focus on neural investigations of emotional decision making into systems outside the orbitofrontal cortex. A small number of studies suggest other brain regions that may support the adaptive role of emotion in decision making, but strong conclusions are not currently possible because (1) emotional decision making is not the main focus of some studies so it can only be inferred; or (2) a lack of behavioral effects make it difficult to interpret the psychological meaning of neural activity. The chapter concludes by proposing future directions for “social neuroscience” investigations of emotional decision making.

This chapter considers the broader implications of social neuroscience. These days, even the most ardent dualists recognize that we have brains and that our brains must do something. In recent decades we've learned that brains do many things that are historically within the province of the soul: perception, memory, the production and comprehension of language, and so forth. The soul has, as it were, “outsourced” these operations to the brain. This outsourcing process, still ongoing, raises a question: How many of the soul's functions can be taken up by the brain before the soul is completely out of a job? In other words, what is the soul's “core competence?” The chapter contends that the answer is moral judgment. After all, in many religious traditions it is the quality of a soul's moral judgment and character that determines where it ends up, either permanently or on the next go-around. Thus, if the soul is not in the moral judgment business, it is not in any business at all. And, thus, what it would take to send the soul packing for good is a purely physical account of how the human mind does its moral business.

How do we reconcile our tendencies to think of others as being similar to us with the importance and ease of seeing ourselves as different from others? This chapter adopts a social cognitive neuroscience (SCN) approach to address this issue, using information about the brain to constrain thinking about the psychological processes involved in perceiving people. It reviews neuroimaging research on self-perception, emotion, and social cognition with an eye toward understanding the person perception processes that lead to our dual tendencies to see others as both like and not like ourselves. It reviews neuroimaging research on self-perception, emotion, and social cognition with an eye toward understanding the person perception processes that lead to our dual tendencies to see others as both like and not like ourselves. It differentiates between two modes of processing information about people—one that is a quick, direct, and bottom-up and another that is deliberative, reflective, and top-down. The chapter then examines whether self and other overlap may depend critically on which mode of processing perceivers are engaging.

This chapter discusses the advantages and disadvantages of an approach to social cognitive neuroscience that involves imaging brain function in subjects who are immersed in genuine social interactions. It also discusses what this approach can and cannot reveal about one of the fundamental questions in social neuroscience: whether the human brain has domain-specific neural systems that are specialized for social cognition.

Humans are unique in being able to follow rules at a high order of abstraction—or complex systems of abstract rules that are themselves related in an abstract way. This chapter presents findings that provide evidence for specific involvement of the human lateral prefrontal cortex in enabling not only the flexible switching of rules, but also the process of establishing automaticity at high levels of abstraction. Results regarding such automaticity are discussed in a cognitive and social neuroscience context. These lateral prefrontal cortex regions are typically considered specific to controlled, rule‐guided behavior; however, under conditions requiring complex systems of rules to be followed, these same regions appear to support the formation of complex automatic behaviors. This somewhat unexpected finding of the reliance of automaticity on the lateral prefrontal cortex underscores the importance of investigating rule‐guided behavior in its full, uniquely human, complexity.

What are the neural processes involved in perceiving out-groups? The pace of inquiry into this topic has picked up considerably since the pioneering neuroimaging studies conducted in 2000, yielding several insights into the neural processes involved in perceiving, responding to, and regulating responses to out-groups. Chapter 6–8 elegantly synthesize the social neuroscience work on perceiving out-groups and suggest several areas for further inquiry. This chapter first summarizes the insights provided by these chapters and then goes on to outlining areas for further inquiry.

In this chapter, we discuss the role of empathy as the main precursor for prosocial behavior, taking perspectives that span from social and developmental psychology to social neuroscience. We begin by introducing compassion fatigue in caregivers as a form of pathological altruism. We move on to introduce such relevant concepts as empathy, compassion, empathic concern, and distress; we then review relevant empirical findings from social and developmental psychology and social neuroscience. Finally, we propose a new integrative model that suggests that the term compassion fatigue should be replaced by the term empathic distress fatigue to more accurately account for symptoms of withdrawal and burnout. We conclude by outlining potential ways to circumvent the downside of too much empathy.

The social world consists of many institutions in which the ability to regulate our individual behavior in accordance with social demands is of paramount importance. This chapter examines some of the crucial issues of how attention operates in this social world. It first considers pathologies that involve attention and then looks at the role of attention in the education system. Finally, it considers the significance of attention to a number of longstanding issues in cognitive and social neuroscience.

Much has changed, and much has happened, in the four centuries since Hobbes wrote Leviathan. However, his jaundiced view of human nature and the necessity of enforced moral codes remains the dominant organizing principle of our social and legal systems. Our judicial restraints have multiplied and the number of our incarcerated citizens continues to escalate dramatically. Given this apparent paradox, one can be forced into one of two conclusions, i.e., human beings are incapable of being morally constrained; or, our current model of societal morality is inadequate (or simply wrong). This chapter argues for the latter. Recent advances in the social neurosciences are providing us with insights into ourselves that require us to re-evaluate and evolve our models of social morality. Rather than replacing our current models, these insights provide us with an opportunity to support the emergence of social systems that not only inhibit anti-social behaviours, but actually support pro-social behaviours by our citizens.

The ability to feel what others are feeling is basic to human social life. In recent years, neuroscientists have begun to study empathy as distinct from other affective phenomena or mentalizing. Together this research demonstrates that empathy occurs in a variety of domains and is modulated by both context and dispositional differences. Research further suggests that vicarious feeling relies upon many of the same neural networks that represent direct experience. This chapter provides an overview of the field. Focusing on empathy for pain, we describe different experimental methods and their findings. We hone in on several cortical regions that are frequently associated with empathy, the anterior insula and the cingulate cortex. We further present evidence for the link between empathy and prosocial behavior. Throughout the chapter, we highlight unanswered questions and propose future avenues for research.

Empathy research, which has long been a focus of scholars in philosophy and in clinical and developmental psychology, has emerged as a multidisciplinary discipline encompassing personality and social psychology, cognitive-affective neuroscience, and mainstream cognitive psychology. This book examines the concept of empathy and the variety of meanings it has engendered from a social neuroscience perspective. It looks at eight conceptually distinct phenomena that have all been labeled “empathy” and discusses a range of clinical perspectives on empathy. The book considers the role of empathy in the Rogerian client-centered perspective, how empathy is achieved during psychotherapy, the concept of empathic resonance from a neuroscience perspective, how empathy is related to morality and social convention, and the role of empathy in people’s reactions to others in pain. It also discusses the evolutionary and neuroanatomical history of empathy, with an emphasis on the mirror neuron system and the distinction between empathy and personal distress. Finally, the book argues that empathy involves separate but otherwise interacting brain networks.