Abstract

Social neuroscience studies the neurobiology of how people make sense of people. Due to conceptual and methodological limitations, the field has only more recently begun to study social interaction rather than social observation, which has become known as the development of a 'second-person neuroscience' or an "interactive turn" in social neuroscience. These developments have helped to gain new insights into the behavioural and neural mechanisms of social interactions. Findings to date suggest that the neural mechanisms supporting social interaction differ from those involved in social observation and highlight a role of the so-called ‘mentalizing network’ as important in this distinction.

Taking social interaction seriously may also be particularly important for the advancement of the scientific study of different psychiatric conditions, which are ubiquitously characterized by social impairments, so that they have been considered as ‚disorders of social interaction‘. Here, developing new tools for interaction-based phenotyping appears like a promising strategy in order to quantitatively assess transdiagnostic social impairments and to promote a mechanistic understanding of the complexities of psychiatric disorders with the aim of establishing an inter-personalized form of medicine.

About the speaker

Leonhard Schilbach, Professor

Munich Center for Neuroscience

Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München

https://www.leoschilbach.de/