Neural Basis of Social Behavior: Key Findings Presented at Neuroscience 2019

Summary: Recent brain imaging and neural recording studies presented at Neuroscience 2019 reveal new insights into how the human brain supports social behaviors such as empathy, touch-based communication, team flow, and theory of mind. These results advance our understanding of normal social functioning and may help explain social dysfunction in conditions like autism spectrum disorder.

Source: SfN

Humans are deeply social animals, and our brains contain complex networks that enable an extraordinary range of social abilities. Researchers are beginning to map those networks at multiple levels — from neurons that represent another person’s intentions to coordinated brain activity between individuals interacting in real time. The new findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting highlight both specific neural mechanisms and broader principles that underlie social interaction and social cognition. A clearer picture of these mechanisms could inform future research into disorders that affect social behavior, including autism spectrum disorder, social anxiety, and related conditions.

The major findings reported include the following key points and their implications:

• Researchers identified a core, intuitive language of social touch: a small set of common gestures that people use to communicate emotions such as love, attention, happiness, sadness, gratitude and calming. This work suggests that touch provides a universal, efficient channel for conveying social information, and it helps explain why physical contact is a powerful regulator of emotional states.
• Experiments with romantic partners found that holding hands during a painful experience increases synchrony in brainwave patterns between the partners and corresponds with a reduced subjective experience of pain. This neural coordination offers a physiological substrate for empathic support and shows how close relationships can modulate both perception and neural dynamics.
• The phenomenon known as “team flow” — when a group reaches a shared state of focused engagement working toward a common goal — is associated with a distinct brain state and measurable synchronization of neural activity across teammates. This finding links subjective reports of collective engagement to objective measures of interbrain coupling, providing a biological basis for collaborative performance and shared experience.
• In nonhuman primates, researchers discovered a previously unreported type of amygdala neuron that appears to simulate a social partner’s decision process, enabling an individual to predict a partner’s intentions and likely choices. Such predictive representations may serve as building blocks for social planning and adaptive interaction.
• Recordings from the human prefrontal cortex revealed neurons whose activity reflects the thoughts and beliefs of other people, consistent with a neural substrate for theory of mind — the capacity to represent and reason about the mental states of others. These neurons provide a neural correlate for perspective-taking and complex social reasoning.

These converging lines of evidence — from observational studies of touch and partnership to invasive recordings that reveal individual neurons representing others’ minds — illustrate a central theme: social cognition is supported by both specialized neural representations and dynamic coordination across brains. Researchers emphasize that social processes operate at multiple scales, and combining behavioral, electrophysiological and imaging approaches will be essential for building a comprehensive model.

“The neuroscience advances presented today expand our understanding of how our brains process social information, enabling us to live in our complex society,” said Michael Platt, PhD, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies decision processes. “These advances provide potential new avenues for researching empathy, theory of mind and even conditions such as autism spectrum disorder.”

Funding: The research reported was supported by national funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, together with private funding organizations. These funding sources enabled a mix of behavioral experiments, neural recordings in animal models and human brain imaging studies that together build a richer picture of social neuroscience.

Source:
SfN
Media Contacts:
Matt Windsor – SfN
Image Source:
The image is in the public domain.

Original Research: The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2019.