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As a social species, humans create emergent organizations beyond the individual - structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and international alliances. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped humans survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too survived to reproduce, thereby ensuring their genetic legacy. Human beings are inherently social creatures. From birth, we forge an array of social connections with one another, including intimate personal relationships within complex societal networks. Our survival and well-being critically depends on social interaction with others.



Social neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of the neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms underlying the emergent structures that define social species. While higher order meta-cognitive processes affect how we consciously operate and intentionally influence our functioning, automatic and unconscious mechanisms account for much more of our social interaction than we intuit. Furthermore, we cannot understand human social behavior without reference to evolutionary principles. Many aspects of our bodies, mind, and societies need to be understood as products of evolution, just like any other species.

In the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (SCNL) at the University of Chicago, we investigate the core of dynamic inter-personal experience – how emotion and subjective feelings about others and self are represented in the brain and manifested in social interaction. Our research focuses on interpersonal processes including empathy, sympathy, perspective-taking, moral reasoning,
and emotion regulation. We also study the neurodevelopement of these processes in developing children and adolescents using the latest functional neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques. Because various psychopathologies are marked by interpersonal sensitivity deficits, we explore dysfunctions in the biopsychological mechanisms underpinning social information processing in children and adults with developmental and personality disorders including aggressive conduct disorder and antisocial behavior. Such a multi-disciplinary approach, that bridges affective neuroscience, developmental science and social psychology has the potential for generating new hypotheses concerning social cognitive disorders and aids our understanding and treatment of abnormal human social behavior.

Dr. Jean Decety, Head of the Lab.

Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
The University of Chicago
5848 S. University Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60637