Social Neuroscience

Brain, Mind, and Society

Russell K. Schutt, Larry J. Seidman, Matcheri Keshavan MD, Russell K. Schutt, Larry J. Seidman, Matcheri Keshavan MD

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674728974
• eBook ISBN: 9780674286733
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Human beings evolved in the company of others and flourish in proportion to their positive social ties. To understand the human brain, we must situate its biology in the wider context of society. To understand society, we must also consider how the brains and minds of individuals shape interactions with other human beings. Social Neuroscience offers a comprehensive new framework for studying the brain, human development, and human behavior.

In this book, leading researchers in the fields of neurobiology, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology elucidate the connections between brain biology and the brain's functioning in the social world, providing a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary explanation of how humans think and act, as well as the ways we define and treat pathological behavior. Synthesizing the insights and perspectives of these experts, Social Neuroscience examines how neural processes make the brain sensitive to social experience, how cognition shapes social behavior, and how social networks create a range of responses among different individuals to the same environmental stimuli.

The mutually reinforcing connections between brain, mind, and society have profound implications for human health, from the emotionally damaging effects of severe social deprivation to the neurological impact of parental abuse and neighborhood violence. The authors explore these connections, with special focus on mental illnesses, including schizophrenia—a disorder characterized by marked social deficits in which a neurological basis is now well established.

1.

Changing Perspectives in Three Disciplines

Russell K. Schutt, Larry J. Seidman, and Matcheri S. Keshavan

HUMAN BEINGS ARE social animals: we evolved in the company of others, we develop through relations with others, and we flourish in proportion to our positive social ties. There is no more certain impediment to normal physical and mental development than social deprivation; there is no more common a correlate of impaired functioning than social isolation. We cannot understand the operation of our brains or the content of our minds without taking into account the society around us, nor can we understand that society without considering how the individuals who comprise it are shaped by their brains and minds.

At the extremes of pathology, the reciprocal effects of individual and social dysfunction are impossible to ignore. The “not guilty by reason of insanity” plea by James Holmes—the twenty-four year old who dressed up as “The Joker” and then killed twelve people in a Colorado movie theater—attempts to explain this attack on his social world as a result of his personal mental dysfunction (Healey, 2013a). The stunted physical and psychological growth of children in Romanian orphanages reflected the Ceausescu dictatorship’s policy of neglecting meaningful emotional attachments in children’s social environments (Behen & Chugani, chapter 12; Nelson, 2014; Perlez, 1996). At the extremes of achievement, the reciprocal benefits of individual and social accomplishment are no less evident. Einstein’s unusual brain has been credited for some of his outsized impact on society (Healey, 2013b), while the most socially connected communities provide a considerable mental health advantage to their residents (McCulloch, 2001).

But between these extremes, in relation to the experiences that are the focus of the daily lives of most individuals and societies—and of most academic research and even clinical practice—the connection between brain, mind, and society is much less evident and the direction of influence much more in dispute. Despite an interdisciplinary consensus that humans are social animals, the disciplines of psychiatry, psychology, and sociology have taken markedly different stances toward the practical salience and the causal direction of the brain-mind-society link; at times during the past century, each discipline has even rejected the need to investigate this connection.

Disciplinary divergence never seemed greater than when President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s to be “The Decade of the Brain.” His July 17, 1990, proclamation of this interagency initiative focused only on the internal workings of the brain and the illnesses presumed to ensue from its malfunction; it did not mention the social environment or draw any connection to the social sciences (www.loc.gov/loc/brain/proclaim.html). Yet as research on the brain accelerated, it became increasingly clear that internal examination alone was insufficient for understanding the development and functioning of this “3-pound mass of interwoven nerve cells that controls our activity” (Bush, 1990). What was most remarkable about the brain was its ability to process information from the environment, adapt to the environment, and effect change in the environment. And describing social relations was central to understanding this reciprocal process. It was time for a new intellectual paradigm (Kandel, 1998, 1999).

A biopsychosocial paradigm (Engel, 1977, 1980) is now becoming a dominant perspective in medicine, psychiatry, and psychology, as discoveries in neuroscience identify connections between neurological and social processes and highlight the value of psychosocial treatments for mental illness (Garland & Howard, 2009). The term social neuroscience, first proposed in 1992 (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1992), has since become a recognized subdiscipline with its own journal and professional association (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013); “social cognition”—as recently as 1991 a topic within psychology conceived as needing no attention to neuroscience (Fiske & Taylor, 1991)—has been reconceptualized as linking “brains to culture” (Fiske & Taylor, 2013); “neurosociology” has gained adherents within its parent discipline (Franks & Turner, 2013; Smith & Franks, 1999). Recent books and conferences have begun to connect social neuroscience to broader social processes and social problems (Lieberman, 2013; Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013; Social Brain Conference, 2008).

After twenty-five years of rapid scientific progress, we are thus at a uniquely fertile moment in the development of the biopsychosocial paradigm. However, despite this progress, the potential of social neuroscience for interdisciplinary integration has yet to be achieved. Many psychiatrists remain focused solely on psychopharmacological solutions to serious mental illness, some psychologists typically conceive of social neuroscience as extending “upward” only to topics in social psychology (discussed by Cacioppo & Berntson, 1992; Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001), social cognition as developed by psychologists has had little impact on sociologists who study social interaction, and while a few sociologists conceive of neurosociology as “the nexus between neuroscience and social psychology” (Franks, 2010; Franks, 2013; Franks & Smith, 1999/2008), most remain “in the position of being the last to know about how our very biological brain is simultaneously social in nature” (Franks, 2010, p. 2).

Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society seeks to build the interdisciplinary foundation for social neuroscience by presenting research that illustrates its potential within each of our disciplines and by critiquing the assumptions that have lessened interest in cross-disciplinary engagement. Our chapter authors have maintained a common focus on understanding mental illness in order to facilitate cross-disciplinary comparison. We give particular attention to contributions by sociologists so that our book helps broaden the conception of social neuroscience to encompass social processes at the community, national, and cultural levels. We seek, in other words, to chart a course for further progress in psychiatry, psychology, and sociology that is grounded in a truly interdisciplinary social neuroscience and that can guide development of more effective treatments for serious mental illness. We also connect our approach to related developments in anthropology, economics, and political science, although these disciplines are not represented among our chapter authors.

We find support for our approach in three developments. First is the recent explosion of discoveries in neuroscience and related fields that has identified many points of intersection between the brain and the social world (Cacioppo, Visser, & Pickett, 2006; Lieberman, 2013; Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013; Chapter 2 by Keshavan, this volume). This research has made it clear that the human brain was sculpted by the social world in which our species evolved and that its daily functioning can be understood only in relation to the social world in which we live. Social influence on the evolution of our species is replicated by the ontogenetic development of the brain: the brain is exquisitely shaped by the caretaking environment on a daily basis, and this in turn has profound effects on society (Conti & Heckman, 2012). It is only when we recognize this fundamental social character of the human brain that we can understand the unique features of the human mind. This book is first and foremost an effort to present leading examples from this large body of recent research, with a particular focus on its implications for our understanding of serious mental illnesses—particularly schizophrenia—that involve social difficulties.

We also find support for our approach in the nascent efforts within sociology to engage with the biologically based understanding of human sociality that has emerged from neuroscience research, although our primary motivation for making this connection is the evidence of how much remains to be done rather than what has been achieved. As British sociologist Nikolas Rose comments in his recent book with Joelle Abi-Rached (2013), most sociologists continue to reject the relevance of biology and neuroscience for understanding larger social processes (p. 160) and remain unaware that the “most sophisticated” perspective in the new brain services is that “the biological and the social are not distinct but intertwined” (p. 3). Although this resistance is more than a century old and has at times served a positive function (Degler, 1991), we believe it has become an anachronism: psychiatry and psychology have recognized the importance for their disciplines of taking account of the social world, and the costs of failing to do so are increasingly evident. Our introduction to the book’s section on the influence of the social world reviews the origins of this disjuncture in sociology, while the chapters that follow identify ways to engage the field in productive interdisciplinary collaboration.

Perhaps the strongest evidence in support of our interdisciplinary effort at this time is the fact that we have much distinguished company. Science is by design a collaborative enterprise, and so scientific advances always emerge from a process of sharing discoveries, reviewing evidence, and identifying gaps in understanding. We therefore are more confident in the importance of our own effort because it joins a panoply of outstanding books and distinguished authors, including Eric R. Kandel’s (2005) Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind; John T. Cacioppo, Penny S. Visser, and Cynthia L. Pickett’s (2006) Social Neuroscience: People Thinking about People; Matthew D. Lieberman’s (2013) Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect; Jonathan H. Turner’s (2007) Human Emotions: A Sociological Theory; Douglas S. Massey’s Strangers in a Strange Land: Humans in an Urbanizing World (2005); and David D. Franks’s (2010) Neurosociology: The Nexus between Neuroscience and Social Psychology. It is definitely a fertile time for advancing the perspective of social neuroscience and developing a truly interdisciplinary understanding of sociality.

What most distinguishes our approach from these earlier contributions is the disciplinary and thus explanatory reach of our chapters, from the brain’s neurobiology to the mind’s psychology to social factors at the family, neighborhood, and societal levels. By contrast, psychiatrist Eric Kandel’s (2005) “new intellectual framework for psychiatry” highlights the implications of neurobiology for psychiatry but does not make connections to the disciplines of psychology or sociology. Psychologists John T. Cacioppo and colleagues (2006) focus squarely on the points of intersection between neuroscience and psychology but without engaging sociology. While chapters in their book contribute to “wiping off the cobwebs of twentieth-century simplicities about human nature and human nurture” (Banaji, 2006, p. x), we believe that the value of the new field of social neuroscience will not be realized until it includes attention to the macro level of the social world on which most sociologists focus. Douglas S. Massey’s 2001 American Sociological Association presidential address outlined for sociologists the new approach to understanding human evolution that we also endorse (Massey, 2002), but both that address and his subsequent related book (Massey, 2005) did not attempt to connect to the understanding of mental illness and social cognition that has been developed in psychiatry and psychology. As recently as 1999, sociologists David Franks and Thomas Smith (1999/2008) edited a volume about the sociology of emotions without examples from the large body of related research in psychology, neuroscience, or psychiatry.

The most recent contributions in this genre reflect the growing recognition “that integrative multilevel analysis can contribute to the development of more comprehensive models of complex social behavior” (Norman et al., 2013, p. 77) and hence the broader perspective that has also informed this book (Decety & Cacioppo, 2011). Both psychologist Matthew D. Lieberman (2013) and sociologist Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached (2013) connect research on the brain to group behavior and social processes, while contributions in an American Psychological Association volume edited by Mario Mikulincer and Philip R. Shaver (2014) span the same range—even though they include no sociologists. The latest books by neurosociologists David D. Franks (2010) and Warren D. TenHouten (2013) are consciously interdisciplinary, as is the new Handbook of Neurosociology by Franks and Turner (2013). Although somewhat older and oriented to anthropology, the volume by Sussman and Chapman (2004) on human sociality is also quite consciously interdisciplinary.

Historically, the crux of disciplinary divergence has been the role of the mind in the relation between brain, mind, and society (Degler, 1991, pp. 330–333; Mead, 1913), while the impetus for recent disciplinary convergence has been the ability to connect mental states to both neural and social processes (Lieberman, 2013). It is in our minds that we harbor our sense of ourselves as unique individuals, and in which we have the ability to review our past, engage the present, and plan the future. It is our minds that allow us to believe that we are quite unlike other animals in our knowledge of ourselves and in our ability to shape the world in which we live into something markedly different from the world in which we evolved. Yet despite its marvelous capacities, we cannot put our hands on our mind, nor can we find our mind in the world around us. There is no unimpeachable answer to the question of what the human mind “is.”

From a purely biological perspective, the mind is the product of the unique organ that is the human brain. It can be understood in terms of the neurological structure from which it emerges and the neural connections with which it functions:

there are no questions concerning the physical basis of consciousness that differ in principle from other ordinary problems about the physical and functional basis of genes, inheritance, or solidity and liquidity. (Bownds, 1999, n.p.)

From a strictly sociological perspective, the mind is created by engagement in the social world—from the myriad interactions that help us understand who we are in relation to others.

If failure or disgrace arrives, if one suddenly finds that the faces of men [sic] show coldness or contempt instead of the kindliness and deference that he is used to, he will perceive from the shock, the fear, the se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Changing Perspectives in Three Disciplines
• The Social Brain
• The Social Mind
• The Social World
• Color Plates
• Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Figure Credits
• Index