John Cacioppo - Social Neuroscience

Social Neuroscience

Social neuroscience is the new discipline that examines the associations between social and neural levels of organizations and the biological mechanisms underlying these associations. Neuroscientists have tended to focus on single organisms, organs, cells, or intracellular processes. Social species create emergent organizations beyond the individual, however, and these emergent structures evolved hand in hand with neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped animals survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced. Social neuroscience, therefore, is concerned with how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, capitalizing on concepts and methods from the neuroscience to inform and refine theories of social psychological processes, and using social and behavioral concepts and data to inform and refine theories of neural organization and function John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson are the founding fathers of social neuroscience.

More than 20 years ago, John began working with Gary Berntson of The Ohio State University to pioneer a new field they called “social neuroscience.” This is an interdisciplinary attempt to trace how social forces “get under the skin” to affect physiology, as well as how physiology influences social interactions. John’s recent research on loneliness, conducted in collaboration with Louise Hawkley, Ron Thisted, and Linda Waite, has raised questions about one of the pillars of modern medicine and psychology—the focus on the individual as the broadest appropriate unit of inquiry. By employing brain scans, monitoring of autonomic and neuroendocrine processes, and assays of immune function, John and his colleagues have found that the influence of social context is so strong that it can alter genetic expression in white blood cells. This research also showed how the subjective sense of social isolation (“loneliness”) uniquely disrupts our perceptions, behavior, and physiology, becoming a trap that not only reinforces isolation, but can lead to early death.

John Cacioppo and Jean Decety played an instrumental role in the creation of the Society for Social Neuroscience in 2010.