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Editorial Review Product Description
A full understanding of the biology and behavior of humans cannot be complete without the collective contributions of the social sciences, cognitive sciences, and neurosciences. This book collects eighty-two of the foundational articles in the emerging discipline of social neuroscience.The book addresses five main areas of research: multilevel integrative analyses of social behavior, using the tools of neuroscience, cognitive science, and social science to examine specific cases of social interaction; the relationships between social cognition and the brain, using noninvasive brain imaging to document brain function in various social situations; rudimentary biological mechanisms for motivation, emotion, and attitudes, and the shaping of these mechanisms by social factors; the biology of social relationships and interpersonal processes; and social influences on biology and health. ... Read more Customer Reviews (2) 
Slosh
It isn't that they shouldn't, but some words, posed as category mistakes, don't seem to go together. For instances, consider waves and particles, "genomic environment" or, as is the case in the title under review, "social neuroscience." These odd couples seem to grind against each other, as if repelled to opposite places in long established categories like tectonic plates whose shifting juxtaposition shambles an established order. This antonymic phenomenon highlights a problem that has confronted science-makers stretching back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle and on to Descartes, Popper, and contemporary philosophers of science. The problem is this. To study, we take things apart, introducing vast vocabularies of particularization. To understand more comprehensively, we put these particulars back together, meshing, overlapping, integrating, and harmonizing the cacophony of disciplinary vocabularies. These are not either/or processes. It was so much easier in thought networks like those of the Zuni who saw ever so clearly that there was no such distinction between a wave and the sea itself. They called it "slosh."
FOUNDATIONS IN SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE is a hefty volume (1357 pages) demonstrating that neuroscience is now old enough to be married to human adaptive experience. Like the Zuni word "slosh" it reminds us that nature abhors boundaries as well as vacuums. FOUNDATIONS evidences meaningful synthesis and integration, working up and down the conceptual ladder from the micro to the macro and back again. Transduction processes are explicated from mRNA to hormonal development to tactile comforting to social capital and then back to mRNA, as environmental circumstances feed forward and back to affect neurophysiological and neurochemical ones in the ongoing dynamics of human adaptation.
FOUNDATIONS IN SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE is also, in a sense, a birth announcement of a novel interdiscipline. This is concretized in a very unusual arrangement, the kind one comes to expect from The University of Chicago, where John T. Cacioppo, the first listed editor of this volume, is the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor, Director of the Social Psychology Program AND Director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. Other editors include Gary G. Berntson, Ralph Adolphs, C. Sue Carter and eight others whose names are a Who's Who in the biological and social sciences. Thus FOUNDATIONS might well be called the bible of this newly emerging integrative program, with newer testaments added by professors Cacioppo and Berntson and colleagues more recently. (Cf. J.T. Cacioppo & G.G. Berntson, Eds., ESSAYS IN SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004; J.T. Cacioppo & G.G. Berntson, Eds.. SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE: KEY READINGS. New York: Psychology Press, 2004; J.T. Cacioppo, P.S. Visser, & C.L. Pickett, Eds.. SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE: PEOPLE THINKING ABOUT THINKING PEOPLE. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
A short list of FOUNDATIONS accomplishments includes 1) the significant effort toward the creation of harmony out of the disciplines of genetics, physiology, immunology, endocrinology, neuroscience,cognitive psychology, personality psychology and sociology 2) the description of a relatively seamless connectedness from DNA to social experience to DNA, 3) the taxonomic outline ofSocial Neuroscience as a scientific interdiscipline: (A) Multilevel Integrative Analysis of Social Behavior, (B) Social Cognition and the Brain, (C) Social Neuroscience of Motivation, Emotion, and Attitudes, (D) Biology of Social Relationships and Interpersonal Processes, (E) Social Influences on Biology and Health, and 4) the collection of seminal research in social neuroscience between the covers of one very big book. At least implicitly, numerous chapters challenge Francis Crick's "Central Dogma" and the notion of locked in and closed off genetic material impervious to adaptive environmental influences.
FOUNDATIONS has 83 chapters but the one by Liu, Diorio, et al. (Chap. 48: Maternal care, hippocampal glucocorticoid receptors and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal responses to stress), which reports on the research program from the Montreal laboratory of Michael Meaney at McGill, gives a very good sense of the integration from mRNA to hormonal and neural development to social activity and then back again to mRNA. The authors pick up on the work of Levine a half century ago on the post-partum handling of rat pups, who when compared to non-handled ones, had reduced responses to stress. Levine's work revealed that the handling affected the stress response including hormonal release (adrenal corticosterone). Liu and colleagues report on a series of experiments showing that handling affects pup behavior (increased ultrasonic vocalizations), which affects maternal care (pattern of licking and grooming), which affects variability in the expression of mRNA in various systems, which affects neural and hormonal system development (parvocellular neurons of the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus), which affects inhibitory feedback of the stress response (in rats, level of release of corticotrophin releasing hormone) and raises the possibility of non-genomic modes of inheritance. (For more on non-genomic inheritance see: E. Jablonka & M.J. Lamb, EVOLUTION IN FOUR DIMENSIONS. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
FOUNDATIONS is an extraordinary exposition that is a must read for life and social scientists as well as those life-long learners interested in human adaptation. An excellent companion volume is by Bruce S. McEwen and H. Maurice Goodman, Eds.. HANDBOOK OF PHYSIOLOGY: COPING WITH THE ENVIRONMENT: Vol. IV. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001. See also, A. R. Cellura's THE GENOMIC ENVIRONMENT AND NICHE-EXPERIENCE. Abbeville, SC: Cedar Springs Press, 2005, for the confluence of genomic influences, central nervous system development, economic regimes, ecological niches, caloric intake, stature, morbidity and mortality.
A fascinating collection of articles
Which brain mechanisms are involved in the typical social interactions that humans engage in everyday life? To what extent are these interactions determined by the dynamical processes in the human brain? Are there separate areas or modules in the brain responsible for these interactions, and what happens when these modules become dysfunctional? These questions, along with many more, are addressed in this collection of articles, which are written for experts in cognitive neuroscience. However, non-experts, such as this reviewer, can profit from a perusal of the articles, even if they have only an understanding of the basic rudiments of cognitive neuroscience. Only twenty-six of these articles were read by this reviewer, and for lack of space just a few of these will be reviewed here.
The article entitled "Neural Correlates of Theory-of-Mind Reasoning: An Event-Related Potential Study", is an attempt to find the neural system that is behind reasoning about mental states. Such a finding is deemed important by the authors of this article, since an impairment of this system may result in autism. They quote research that is suggestive of the idea that the ability to think about mental representations of reality, such as beliefs, is not correlated with the ability to think about other kinds of representations of reality, such as photographs. Autistic individuals have trouble with the former but not with the latter. The authors outline experimental tests that illustrate these differences, and also discuss experiments that show that autistic individuals show greater impairment for left-hemispheric tasks. The implications of these studies for a modularized theory of mind is discussed in some detail, and they conclude these studies give evidence for the assertion that neurophysiological abnormalities in autistic individuals is related to deficits in their social cognitive abilities.
For this reviewer, the most interesting article in the book is the one entitled "Attention, Self-Regulation, and Consciousness", which as the name implies, addresses the study of consciousness. The scientific study of consciousness is finally being taken seriously by cognitive neuroscientists, and this article gives a good example of this. The authors concentrate on the voluntary control of the mental processes that are responsible for the regulation of behavior and thought. They clearly have no qualms at being at odds with entrenched philosophical notions of consciousness and voluntary control. The neuronal system that is responsible for the regulation of thought, emotion, and behavior, is, in their view, one that consists of the midfrontal cortical areas and the underlying basal ganglia. This system has been called the `executive network' by cognitive neuroscientists, and is active for tasks involving selection, conflict, and error detection. The authors discuss various experiments that were conducted to investigate the brain mechanisms behind these three tasks.For selection, the experiment involved the reading of individual words and monitoring (using PET) the brain activity in finding the use of the words. The `scalp signatures' of some of these activations, along with the PET and later fMRI studies, reveal the dynamics involved in the creation of a single thought. The fMRI data revealed even more, namely that different areas are activated when different semantic categories are processed. Most interesting is that these experiments revealed that the neuronal activity in an area that is attended to inhibits items that are far outside of the category attended to. When elements of a task are in conflict, it is expected that executive control will perform the selected function. Experiments involving the Stroop effect revealed that the midline frontal areas are involved in the resolution of conflict between tasks, but that they are not involved in the feelings of conflict and effort. The supervisory attention system is also concerned with error detection, which the authors view as a conscious strategy to adjust the performance speed to a level of accuracy that is deemed adequate. Experiments revealed that error negativity is localized in the anterior cingulate gyrus, but that the areas of activation of the cingulate were different depending on the task demand.
Still another highly interesting article is entitled "In Search of the Self: A Positron Emission Tomography Study" wherein the authors study the assertion that the association of episodic memory retrieval with the activation of right prefrontal cortex can be attributed to the representation of the self in this portion of the brain. In addition, the authors wanted to find out if there was any evidence for the neural correlates of self-referential processing, i.e. does an individual for example remember a word better if it is reference with respect to the self rather than just processed in semantic terms? In the opinion of the authors, if the self is involved in the activation of the right frontal regions in a manner which is independent of the nature of the cognitive operation, then self-referential encoding will also be associated with PET activations that are mainly right lateralized. If the self-referential encoding is associated with activations in the left frontal regions, then it would be similar to other types of (deeper) processing. Experiments were conducted that enabled a comparison between semantic "self", "other", and "general" tasks, and nonsemantic "syllable" tasks. These experiments revealed that adjectives judged semantically were better recognized in a later test than adjectives judged in terms of the number of syllables. Adjectives in the "self" condition were better recognized than those in the "other" and "general" conditions, thus indicating a self-reference effect in memory. Most interesting is the authors' contention that the similarities in cortical activation patterns between the "self" condition and the "other" and "general" conditions reveal that thoughts of self involve a "conceptual self", i.e. a representational schema that arises from an abstraction of several personal episodes. Quoting other researchers, they view the self as a "highly-organized cognitive structure" abstracted from individual instances. Individuals who are brain-damaged and do not possess episodic memory but who can form accurate judgments about their personality characteristics provide further evidence for their assertions.
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