The social brain?

By ChrisD . Frith. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2007

873 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The notion that there is a ‘social brain’ in humans specialized for social interactions has received considerable support from brain imaging and, to a lesser extent, from lesion studies. Specific roles for the various components of the social brain are beginning to emerge. For example, the amygdala attaches emotional value to faces, enabling us to recognize expressions such as fear and trustworthiness, while the posterior superior temporal sulcus predicts the end point of the complex trajectories created when agents act upon the world. It has proved more difficult to assign a role to medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistently activated when people think about mental states. I suggest that this region may have a special role in the second-order representations needed for communicative acts when we have to represent someone else's representation of our own mental state. These cognitive processes are not specifically social, since they can be applied in other domains. However, these cognitive processes have been driven to ever higher levels of sophistication by the complexities of social interaction.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb88c4a4a8677f57cde5052b79a2f8bfd6137c30

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Citations in the corpus

An inkblot for attitudes: affect misattribution as implicit measurement. (2005, background): “Even people’s feelings of conscious agency can be misattributed from observations of their own behavior (Gazzaniga, 1985; Wegner, 2003).”
Insights from the application of computational neuroimaging to social neuroscience. (2013, background): “Learning signals consistent with these computations engage regions previously identified through noncomputational neuroimaging approaches as being involved in social inferential processes such as mentalizing and theory of mind [2,3]; specifically the anterior dorsomedial frontal cortex [10,17,39], p”
Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies (2015, background): “I start with key findings related to cultural microevolution, and gradually move to cultural macroevolution.”
Imaging brain development: The adolescent brain (2012, background): “Frith has proposed that the dMPFC is involved in the necessary decoupling of mental states from physical reality, whereas the pSTS/TPJ is involved in predicting what movement a conspecific is about to make (Frith, 2007; although see Saxe, 2006, for alternative viewpoint).”
Minds Made for Sharing: Initiating Joint Attention Recruits Reward-related Neurocircuitry (2010, background): “In this way, sender and receiver engage in a triadic interaction by exchanging intentional actions for communicative purposes (Frith, 2007 ).”
The emergence of music from the Theory of Mind (2009, background): “There is also growing neuroscientific evidence to support the existence of both mechanisms (Decety & Grèzes, 2006; C. D. Frith, 2007; U. Frith & Frith, 2003; Saxe & Kanwisher, 2004; Saxe & Powell, 2006); though some remain cautious (Apperly et al., 2007; Apperly et al., 2005).”
A developmental, mentalization-based approach to the understanding and treatment of borderline personality disorder (2009, background): “This system is less bodily based, and processes information about the self and others in more abstract and symbolic ways (Frith, 2007; Uddin et al., 2007).”
A neural mechanism of first impressions (2009, background): “In fact, social evaluation recruits brain regions that are not socially specialize”
The Unconscious Mind (2008, background): “…have postulated that the conscious mind is not the source or origin of our behavior; instead, they theorize that impulses to act are unconsciously activated and that the role of consciousness is as gatekeeper and sense maker after the fact (Gazzaniga, 1985; James, 1890; Libet, 1986; Wegner, 2002).”
Is adolescence a sensitive period for sociocultural processing? (2014, background): “Frith (2007) has proposed that the underlying similarity between tasks that activate the dmPFC is their involvement in handling communicative intentions, which requires a second-order representation of mental state, whether our own or another’s.”
The social brain in psychiatric and neurological disorders (2012, neutral): “Such distinctions at the level of stimuli and behavior naturally lead to corresponding distinctions in social cognition and its neural substrates, distinctions that are borne out not only by dissociations observed in healthy brains, but also by the dissociations caused by psychiatric and neurologica”