Social Neuroscience: Complexities to Be Unravelled

Abstract

The use of hormone actions to help unravel brain mechanisms for behavior has led to several striking successes in analyzing neural circuits and cellular mechanisms for social behaviors. This success has prompted us to look forward and speculate about the essential nature of the most complex social behaviors. We propose that there are several aspects that distinguish social neuroscience fromneuroscience more generally. One notion is that the nature of human social behavior is qualitatively different from that of any other species and was perhaps a key driving force behind the evolution of the human mind and brain. Other speculations involve the normative aspects of social behaviors, both prosocial and antisocial. Bringing complex social behaviors into the laboratory for systematic analysis will pose one of the major challenges for experimenters in our field.