Social Neuroscience
Full course description
Social Neuroscience is a new and rapidly growing field of research. It is an interdisciplinary field that asks questions about topics traditionally of interest to social psychologists, economics and political science using methods traditionally employed by cognitive neuroscientists, such as functional brain imaging. In this course, the student will discuss functional MRI research into the following topics: self-reflection, emotion regulation, perceiving others/mirror neurons, intersubject/hyperscanning designs and moral judgement. Students will gain insight into the neural correlates of social behaviour and acquire knowledge about designing a functional MRI study.
The final assessment for this course is a numerical grade between 0,0 and 10,0.
Course objectives
- Students should be able to read and understand social neuroscience literature in a standard journal article format. For this, students will gather a basic understanding in neuroscience background, technology and terminology;
- Students should be able to use this understanding in discussing the application of neuroscientific methods to social psychology topics such as self-reflection, emotion regulation, reappraisal, attitudes, stigma, actions and emotions of others, mirror-neuron system, empathy, social decision making, game theory, cooperation versus competition, moral judgments, theory of mind, event-related design, block-design, BOLD signal;
- The aforementioned knowledge and skills should enable students to formulate research questions based on relevant social theories and design experimental setups that would be fit to solve them.