Editorial: What Determines Social Behavior? Investigating the Role of Emotions, Self-Centered Motives, and Social Norms

摘要

In the last decade, a growing research effort in behavioral sciences, especially psychology and neuroscience, has been invested in the study of the cognitive, biological, and evolutionary foundations of social behavior. Differently from the case of sociology, which studies social behavior also at the group level in terms of organizations and structures, psychology and neuroscience often define “social” as a feature of the individual brain that allows an efficient interaction with conspecifics, and thus constitutes a possible evolutionary advantage ( Matusall ). In this view, an extremely wide range of mental and neural processes can be classified as “social,” from the coding of relevant sensory stimuli about conspecifics (facial expressions, gestures, vocalizations, etc.), to the selection and planning of behavioral responses in complex interpersonal settings (economic transactions, negotiations, etc.). Despite such heterogeneity, there is a converging interest in the scientific community toward the identification of neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie all the many facets of social behavior, and their comparison across species and cultures. This Research Topic was initiated by researchers from the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research “Affective Sciences—Emotions in Individual Behaviour and Social Processes,” a multidisciplinary institution devoted to the study of affect-related processes across various disciplines (from psychology and neuroscience through to history, philosophy, art, and economy). In keeping with this spirit, this Research Topic comprehends 38 contributions from an interdisciplinary community each addressing specific psychological and neural phenomena that can be defined as “social.” In particular, we collected both theoretical and empirical contributions, concerning animals, human individuals (neurotypical adults and children, but also individuals with neurological, psychiatric and developmental disorders) as well as human groups, engaged in either laboratory-controlled settings or real-life situations. Although the theoretical models and the applied research techniques (psychophysical, physiological, neuroimaging, genetic) are very diverse, they converge with a global framework suggesting that the determinants of social behavior can be described across two independent dimensions: (1) a personal-to-environmental dimension, and (2) a transient-to-stable dimension. These contributions thus represent an important cornerstone for building an interdisciplinary and comprehensive model of how individuals deal with the complexity of their social environment. Personal-to-environmental dimension For the purpose of this editorial, we can schematically describe social interactions as cases in which an individual is engaged in a given social environment. Importantly, the individual and the environment exert reciprocal influence on one another, as individual changes could cause, and be caused by, changes in the outside world. Within this context, we can define a behavior of interest any change of the individual's state over time (overt response, brain modulation, etc.), which in turn can be related to two main explanatory variables: a representation of the current state of the individual (to know how a person will change one needs to know how this person is) and a representation of the current state of the environment (to know how a person will change one needs to know what surrounds him/her). Thus, the personal-to-environmental dimension distinguishes between those determinants of social behavior that are attributable to idiosyncratic features of the individual from those that are related to specificities of the environment with which the individual is interacting. Such simplified model fits well our Research Topic, as the various contributions highlight the role of many factors that, despite their diversity, can be readily classified as personal or environmental. Among the personal factors, the role played by genetic polymorphisms is well-described in the present Research Topic through the use of knock-out mice and endophenotype approaches in humans. In all these cases, the implicated genes are known to affect major functions of hormonal and neurotransmitter systems within brain networks important for social cognition. For instance, mice lacking the β2 subunit of neuronal nicotinic receptors of acetylcholine exhibit impaired behavior (relative to wild type mice) when competing with conspecifics for rewards ( Chabout et al. ) Furthermore, following a rich body of literature documenting how intranasal administration of oxytocin affects human social behavior (see Ebner et al ; Haas et al. ; J?rvinen and Bellugi , as reviews), several contributions address the role played by the oxytocin gene receptor (OXTR). Taking a developmental perspective, Ebner et al. show how OXTR polymorphisms differently affect young and older adults' responses in medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) to facia