Interference of Neurons in Human Behaviour

A new field has emerged to investigate the cognitive neuroscience of social behaviour, the popularity of which is attested by recent conferences, special issues of journals1 and 2 and by books 3 and 4. But the theoretical underpinnings of this new field derive from an uneasy marriage of two different approaches to social behaviour: sociobiology and evolutionary psychology on the one hand, and social psychology on the other. The first approach treats the study of social behaviour as a topic in ethology, continuous with studies of motivated behaviour in other animals. The second approach has often emphasized the uniqueness of human behaviour, and the uniqueness of the individual person, their environment and their social surroundings.

These two different emphases do not need to conflict with one another. In fact, neuroscience might offer a reconciliation between biological and psychological approaches to social behaviour in the realization that its neural regulation reflects both innate, automatic and cognitively impenetrable mechanisms, as well as acquired, contextual and volitional aspects that include self-regulation.We share the first category of features with other species, and we might be distinguished from them partly by elaborations on the second category of features. In a way, an acknowledgement of such an architecture simply provides detail to the way in which social cognition is complex - it is complex because it is not monolithic, but rather it consists of several tracks of information processing that can be variously recruited depending on the circumstances. Specifying those tracks, the conditions under which they are engaged, how they interact, and how they must ultimately be coordinated to regulate social behaviour in an adaptive fashion, is the task faced by a neuroscientific approach to social cognition.

Social cognition and emotion