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A Plea for Cross-species Social Neuroscience

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Social Behavior from Rodents to Humans

Part of the book series: Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences ((CTBN,volume 30))

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the question of how our brain makes us sensitive to the state of conspecifics and how that affects our behaviour has undergone a profound change. Twenty years ago what would now be called social neuroscience was focused on the visual processing of facial expressions and body movements in temporal lobe structures of primates (Puce and Perrett 2003). With the discovery of mirror neurons, this changed rapidly towards the modern field of social neuroscience, in which high-level vision is but one of many focuses of interest. In this essay, we will argue that for the further progress of the field, the integration of animal neuroscience and human neuroscience is paramount. We will do so, by focusing on the field of embodied social cognition. We will first show how the combination of animal and human neuroscience was critical in how the discovery of mirror neurons placed the motor system on the map of social cognition. We will then argue why an integrated cross-species approach will be pivotal to our understanding of the neural basis of emotional empathy and its link to prosocial behaviour.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Sören Krach and Markus Wöhr for their comments on an early version of the manuscript. The work was supported by the NARSAD (Young Investigator Grant 22453 to V.G.), N.W.O. (VIDI grant 452-14-015 to V.G.) and the European Research Council of the European Commission (StG grant 312511 to C.K.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, A Research Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Meibergdreef 47, 1105BA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Christian Keysers & Valeria Gazzola

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Christian Keysers & Valeria Gazzola

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  1. Christian Keysers
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  2. Valeria Gazzola
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Correspondence to Christian Keysers .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Behavioral Neuroscience, Experim. and Physiological Psychology Philipps-University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany

    Markus Wöhr

  2. Dep of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Philipps-University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany

    Sören Krach

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Keysers, C., Gazzola, V. (2016). A Plea for Cross-species Social Neuroscience. In: Wöhr, M., Krach, S. (eds) Social Behavior from Rodents to Humans. Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/7854_2016_439

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