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11.1.1: Learning Objectives and Introduction

  • Page ID
    226935
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    Learning Objectives

    • Define social neuroscience and describe its three major goals.
    • Describe how measures of brain activity such as EEG and fMRI are used to make inferences about social processes.
    • Discuss how social categorization occurs.
    • Describe how simulation may be used to make inferences about others.
    • Discuss the ways in which other people can cause stress and also protect us against stress.

    Psychology has a long tradition of using our brains and body to better understand how we think and act. For example, in 1939 Heinrich Kluver and Paul Bucy removed (i.e. lesioned) the temporal lobes in some rhesus monkeys and observed the effect on behavior. Included in these lesions was a subcortical area of the brain called the amygdala. After surgery, the monkeys experienced profound behavioral changes, including loss of fear. These results provided initial evidence that the amygdala plays a role in emotional responses, a finding that has since been confirmed by subsequent studies (Phelps & LeDoux, 2005; Whalen & Phelps, 2009).


    Social Neuroscience by Tiffany A. Ito and Jennifer T. Kubota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.


    This page titled 11.1.1: Learning Objectives and Introduction is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Michael Miguel.