Chapter 17 - Social Dominance Representations in the Human Brain

Abstract

Social dominance refers to relationships wherein the goals of one individual prevail over the goals of another individual in a systematic manner. Dominance hierarchies have emerged as a major evolutionary force to drive dyadic asymmetries in a social group. Understanding how the brain detects, represents, implements, and monitors social dominance hierarchies constitutes a fundamental topic for social neuroscience as well as a major challenge for the future of clinical psychiatry. In this chapter, we argue that the emergence of dominance relationships is learned incrementally, by accumulating positive and negative competitive feedback associated with specific individuals and other members of the social group. We consider such emergence of social dominance as a reinforcement learning problem inspired by neurocomputational approaches traditionally applied to nonsocial cognition. We also report how dominance hierarchies induce changes in specific brain systems, and we review the literature on interindividual differences in the appraisal of social hierarchies, as well as the underlying modulations of the cortisol, testosterone, and serotonin/dopamine systems that mediate these phenomena.