社会认知神经科学定义
社会认知神经科学是对人大脑过程的研究,使人们能够有效地理解他人,理解自己并有效地导航社会世界。社会认知神经科学借鉴了整个社会科学的理论和心理现象,包括社会认知,政治认知,行为经济学和人类学。用于研究这些主题的工具也广泛,包括功能性磁共振成像(fMRI),正电子发射断层扫描,经颅磁刺激,与事件相关的电位,单细胞记录和神经心理病变技术。
社会认知神经科学的背景和历史
社会行为和社会认知具有生物学根源的观念可以追溯到至少在古希腊的至少盖伦(Galen),他们建议我们的社会本质受到我们体内四种物质的混合的影响,称为幽默。这四种物质(血液,黑胆,黄色胆汁和痰液)与人格和人际风格有关(Sanguine,sanguine,sanguine,忧郁,霍乱,痰液)。尽管幽默早已失去了理解思想的科学尝试,但在过去两个世纪中,包括大脑在内的物质身体(包括大脑)直接促进心理过程的概念在心理学研究中变得越来越重要。
Of particular interest to social psychology is the case of Phineas Gage in the 1860s. Gage was considered a socially agreeable and savvy individual until an explosion sent a tamping iron in one side of his brain and out the other. Miraculously, Gage retained his motor skills and cognitive abilities; however, socially and emotionally, he was a changed man. During the years after the accident, Gage made a series of ill-advised social decisions that left him unemployed, penniless, and divorced. By all accounts, his social and emotional makeup was quite different, largely because of damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain located behind the eye sockets. Other cases of neurological damage have also shown neural contributions to social function. Prosopagnosic patients cannot recognize faces as faces even though they can recognize other objects. Damage to a region of the parietal cortex can lead individuals to feel as though other people are controlling their bodily movements. Individuals who have had their corpus callosum severed, cutting off communication between the hemispheres of the brain, will respond appropriately to cues shown exclusively to the right hemisphere of the brain but then provide strange rationalizations for this behavior using the left hemisphere, which was unaware of the original cue. In each of these cases, some social function that humans take for granted is profoundly altered because of localized brain damage.
这些案例研究极具挑衅性。但是,这种情况很少见,因此不足以维持新的研究领域。在1990年代发生了两项发展,这为正在社会认知神经科学中正在发生的研究爆炸奠定了基础。首先,诸如John Cacioppo,Stanley Klein和John Kihlstrom等社会心理学家开始对使用事件相关潜力的脑部受损患者和健康个体应用更复杂的实验方法,以测试社会心理学假设。这些研究人员利用大脑来测试有关正常社会认知涉及哪些过程的问题,而不是专注于描述脑部受损患者受损的问题。就像其他社会心理学家使用自我报告措施和反应时间措施来检验其假设一样,这些科学家也采用了神经措施。
The second major development was the use of fMRI to study social cognition. Although neuroscientists used fMRI throughout the 1990s, social psychologists only began to use this technique in the new millennium (although several British scientists, including Chris Frith, Uta Frith, and Raymond Dolan, did use positron emission tomography in the 1990s to conduct social cognitive neuroscience studies). Starting in the year 2000, social cognitive neuroscience research began to grow exponentially in the number of studies, number of topics studied, and number of researchers. Currently, active research programs are examining the automatic and controlled aspects of attitudes and prejudice, theory of mind, dispositional attribution, empathy, social rejection, social connection, interpersonal attraction, self-awareness, self-recognition, self-knowledge, cognitive dissonance reduction, placebo effects, social factors in economic decision making, moral reasoning, and emotion regulation. Many of these topics are in their infancy with no more than a handful of studies attempting to identify the brain regions that are involved in the process of interest. One might remark, “What good is it to know that social psychological processes take place in the brain? Of course they do, so what?” Indeed, if social cognitive neuroscience began and ended with showing which parts of the brain “light up” when engaging in different social psychological processes, it would be of little significance. Fortunately, most social cognitive neuroscience does not begin and end as an expensive game of Lite-Brite.
社会认知神经科学的重要性
在最佳的社会认知神经科学研究中,(大脑中)问题只是何时,为什么和如何提出问题的前奏。社会认知神经科学与一般的社会心理学具有许多相同的目标,但是带来了一套不同的工具来实现这些科学目标。这些新工具具有几个优点和缺点,尽管关于反应时间测量或功能性神经影像学是一种更好的假设测试工具的争论可能是一种有用的教学练习,但最终还是有意义的是,询问锤子或螺丝动物是否更好。它们都是某些工作的有用工具,对他人来说却不太有用。
Before turning to what fMRI is useful for, it is worth noting some of the limitations of this technique. First, there can be no face-to-face interactions during fMRI. When subjects have their brains scanned, they lay on a narrow bed, which slides into a long narrow tube, and there is no room for multiple people to be scanned in the same scanner while interacting. Second, because of the nature of the imaging procedure, it is critical that subjects keep their heads absolutely still. As a result, subjects cannot speak while the images are being taken. Subjects typically reply to computer tasks that are watched with video goggles by pressing buttons on a small keypad. Finally, because the signals detected in the brain are noisy signals, many pictures must be taken and then averaged together. This means that subjects must perform the same task repeatedly before useful information can be extracted from the scans. The problem with this is that most social psychological research depends on having a large number of subjects each perform a task once. Many of these tasks will quickly lose their psychological meaning if they are repeated again and again. For all these reasons and more, many social psychological questions cannot easily be addressed with fMRI.
功能磁共振成像可以至少以三种方式为社会心理学做出重要贡献:首先,有时两个心理过程在经验上感觉到相似,并产生相似的行为结果,但实际上依赖于不同的基本机制。例如,记住社会信息和非社交信息的能力并没有感觉到这么不同,几十年来,社会心理学家辩论了是否使用相同的机制对社会和非社会信息进行编码和检索。尽管没有得出强烈的结论(如果有任何标准的社会认知工具表明没有针对社会信息处理的特殊机制),但最近的fMRI研究绝对改变了辩论。杰森·米切尔(Jason Mitchell)和他的同事在一系列功能磁共振成像研究中表明,与编码社会和非社会信息有关的大脑区域非常不同。以后来可以记住的方式编码非社交信息与海马中的活动有关,而以后来可以记住的方式编码社交信息与背质前额叶皮层中的活动有关。因此,在用fMRI检查时,明确区分了表面上看起来非常相似并且很难解散行为方法的两个过程。
相反,有时人们不会认为过程依赖相同的机制,而实际上它们确实如此。例如,Naomi Eisenberger和她的同事证明,由于被社会排斥而导致的社会痛苦在类似的大脑区域网络中与身体疼痛的经历产生活动。尽管通常使用身体疼痛的词来描述社会痛苦的感觉(“他伤害了我的感觉”;“她伤了我的心”),但身体和社会痛苦之间的关系主要被认为是隐喻的。身体疼痛似乎是真实的,因为人们可以看到身体伤害,而社会痛苦似乎全都在一个人的脑海中。然而,两者似乎都依靠大脑中的类似机制。也许这种重叠是因为婴儿需要与照料者保持联系以生存,从而在社会分离的反应中感到受伤是维持这种联系的有效机制。
最后,随着越来越多的大脑区域的精确功能学到了越来越多的了解,可能可以推断出某人仅仅看着他或她的大脑的活动而参与的一些心理过程。beplay体育在线登录这样做的好处是,研究人员不需要中断受试者来找出个人的精神状态。例如,如果在悲伤的经历中主要调用大脑的区域,那么人们可以知道一个受试者是否基于该地区的活动而感到悲伤,而不必询问主题。This would be useful because subjects may not always want to report the state that they are in, subjects may not always accurately remember what state they were in before the experimenter asked, and because reporting on one’s current state may change that state or contaminate how the subject will perform in the rest of the experiment. This is one of the loftier goals of social cognitive neuroscience and is not something that can be done currently with precision; however, this kind of analysis may be possible in the future.
Reference:
- Lieberman,M。D.(2007)。社会认知神经科学。核心过程的审查。心理学年度评论,58,18.1-18.31。