The Approach and Advances in Researching on Social Cognitive Neuroscience

Social cognitive neuroscience is a burgeoning mufi-discipline research field,which is the combination of social psychology and cognitive neuroscience.Social cognitive neuroscience seeks to understand phenomena in terms of interactions be- tween three research levels as follow:the social research level,the cognitive research level and the neural research level.It is an e- merging discipline that seeks to explain the psychological and neural bases of socioemotional experience and behavior.Humans crave the company of others and suffer profoundly if temporarily isolated from society.Much of the brain must have evolved to deal with social communication and we are increasingly learning more about the neurophysiological basis of social cognition.The field of social cognitive neuroscience is still relatively new but builds on a variety of well established disciplines induding social,de- velopmental and cognitive psychology,evolutionary biology,neuropsychology and computer science,each providing a solid basis of relevant research.Several years ago,it makes a deep research on stereotyping,attitude and attitude change,person perception,self- knowledge and interaction between affect and cognition.By applying cognitive neuroscience approach to verifying various theories of social psychology,current researches have got advances in some areas but also leave other areas to do further exploitation.Cur- rent studies are elucidating:the role of the amygdala in a variety of evaluative and sodal judgment processes,the role of medial prefrontal cortex in mental state attribution,how frontally mediated controlled processes can regulate perception and experience,and the way in which these and other systems are recruited during social interaction.That is,the current research penetrates into verify- ing various theories of social psychology such as perception and recognition of social cues,social judgment and attribution,ap- praisals regulate perception and experience,social interaction and so on.Future progress will depend upon the development of pro- grammatic lines of research that integrate contemporary social cognitive research with cognitive neuroscience theory and methodolo- gy,and inaugurate a new research way to open out nerve basis of psychological phenomenon of advanced humankind.And also it will combine the researches of unification and dissection,bottom-up and top-down,which will contribute to the establishing of an integrative paradigm of psychology research.