Social Cognitive Neuroscience

 

Kevin Ochsner ochsner@wjh.harvard.edu 5-5097 1440 William James Hall

Matt Lieberman lieber@wjh.harvard.edu 5-9138 1436 William James Hall

Psychology 987d

1408 William James Hall

Thursdays 10am - 12pm

 

Introduction 09/17/98

Social-cognitive-neuroscience (SCN) is an emerging scientific discipline that attempts to integrate the theories, methods, and insights of social cognition and cognitive neuroscience. Although these disciplines share a focus on the information-processing mechanisms that underlie behavior, they move beyond those mechanisms in opposite directions. Cognitive neuroscience moves "downward" into the brain, with the aim of relating particular mental abilities (such as visual-spatial attention, working memory, and so forth) to the structure and function of neural systems. In contrast, social cognition moves from the information-processing mechanisms "upward," into the phenomenology of the person himself or herself, exploring the social, cognitive, and affective forces that motivate particular behaviors, and the consequences that follow from them. By combining these two approaches, SCN is founded on the notion that the most flexible, comprehensive, and generalizable theories of behavior describe the relations among forces operating at three levels of analysis: the social/interpersonal level at which individual experience and behavior can be described, the cognitive level at which specific mediating processes can be described, and the neural level at which systems and circuits of brain structures carry out these processes.

 

Foundational Concepts and Vocabulary 09/24/98

Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition. McGraw-Hill, New York. [selection: Chapter 7, "Social encoding: attention and consciousness."]

Kosslyn, S. M. (1995). Freud returns? In R. L. Solso and D. W. Massarro (Eds.), The science of the mind: 2001 and beyond (pp. 90-106). New York: Oxford University Press. [selection: pp. 93-99]

Kosslyn, S. M. (1994). Image and Brain. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. [selection: from chapter 2, "Carving a System at Its Joints." pp. 26-27 on constraint satisfaction; pp. 37-51]

Ochsner, K. N., & Kosslyn, S. M. (1998). Constraints and Convergence: The Cognitive Neuroscience Approach. In D. O. Rumelhart & B. Martin-Bly (Eds.), The Handbook Of Cognition and Perception, Vol X. Academic Press, San Diego. [selection: pp. 1-9]

 

Attitudes and Behavior 10/01/98

Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230-244.

Bem, D. J. (1967). Self perception: an alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena. Psychological Review, 74, 183-200.

McClelland, D. C., Koestner, R., & Weinberger, J. (1989). How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ? Psychological review, 96, 690-702.

 

Rational Decision Making and Inference 10/08/98

Cohen, J. D., & O'Reilly, R. C. (1996). A preliminary theory of the interactions between prefrontal cortex and hippocampus that contribute to planning and prospective memory. In M. Brandimonte, G. O. Einstein and M. A. McDaniel (Eds.), Prospective Memory: Theory and Applications. Erlbaum: Mahwah, N.J.

Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition, McGraw-Hill, New York. [selection: Chapter 2, "Attribution theory" pp. 32-40]

Wegener, D. T., & Petty, R. E. (1995). Flexible correction processes in social judgment: The role of naive theories in corrections for perceived bias. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 68, 36-51.

 

Intuitive Decision Making and Inference 10/15/98

Kunda, Z., & Thagard, P. (1996). Forming impressions from stereotypes, traits, and behaviors: A parallel-constraint-satisfaction theory. Psychological Review, Vol. 103(2), 284-308. [selection: pp. 284-293].

Lieberman, M. D. (1997). Intuition: A social-cognitive-neuroscience approach. Unpublished Harvard University Manuscript.

Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131.

 

Construal and Reconstruction 10/22/98

Griffin, D. W., & Ross, L. (1991). Subjective construal, social inference, and human misunderstanding. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 24, pp. 319-356). New York: Academic Press. [selection: pp. 319-343]

Johnson, M. J., & Raye, C. L. (1998). False memories and confabulation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2(4), 137-145.

Ochsner, K. N. & Schacter, D. L. (1997). Constructing the emotional past: A social-cognitive-neuroscience approach. To appear in: J. Borod (Ed.), The Neuropsychology of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [selection: pp. 16-34]

 

Memory and Stereotyping 10/29/98

Banaji, M. & Greenwald, A. (1994). Implicit stereotyping and prejudice. In The Psychology of Prejudice: The Ontario Symposium, Vol. 7, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Klein, S. B, Loftus, J., & Kihlstrom, J. F. (1996). Self-knowledge of an amnesic patient: Toward a neuropsychology of personality and social psychology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 125(3), 250-260.

Kunda, Z., & Thagard, P. (1996). Forming impressions from stereotypes, traits, and behaviors: A parallel-constraint-satisfaction theory. Psychological Review, Vol. 103(2), 284-308.

Schacter, D. L. (1996). Searching for memory: The brain, the mind, and the past. New York NY: Basic Books, Inc. [selection: pp. 98-112]

 

Self 1: Self-awareness and its mechanisms 11/05/98

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-259.

Stuss, D. T. (1991). Disturbance of self-awareness after frontal system damage. In G. P. Prigatano & D. L. Schacter (Eds.), Awareness of deficit after brain injury: Clinical and theoretical issues (pp. 63-83). New York, NY: Oxford University Press

Ramachandran, V. S. (1995). Anosagnosia in parietal lobe syndrome. Consciousness and Cognition, 4, 22-55.

 

Self 2: Disorders and Differences in Self-Regulation 11/12/98

Andersen, S. M., Spielman, L. A, & Bargh, J. A. (1992). Future-event schemas and certainty about the future: Automaticity in depressives' future-event predictions. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 63(5), 711-723.

Cross, S. E., & Markus, H. R. (1990). The willful self. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 16(4), pp. 726-742.

Hirst, W. (1994). The remembered self in amnesics. In Neisser, Ulric (Ed), Fivush, Robyn (Ed), et al. The remembering self: Construction and accuracy in the self-narrative. Emory symposia in cognition, 6. (pp. 252-277). Cambridge University Press, New York.

Rapoport, J. L. (1989). The boy who couldn't stop washing: The experience and treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. New York: Penguin Books. [selections: pp. 82-108; 187-199; 207-220]

 

Mindblindness: The failure to see other selves 11/19/98

Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

 

Thanksgiving Break 11/25/98

 

What is Emotion? 12/03/98

Lane, R. D., Reiman, E. M., Ahern, G. L., Schwartz, G. E., & Davidson, R. J. (1997a). Neuroanatomical correlates of happiness, sadness and disgust. American Journal of Psychiatry, 154, 926-933.ß

Lazarus, R. (1991). Progress on a cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion. American Psychologist, 46(8), 819-834.

LeDoux, J. E. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. [selection: chapter 3, "Blood, sweat, and tears," pp. 43-72, and chapter 6, "A few degrees of separation," pp. 139-178]

 

Emotion & Reason 12/10/98

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes' error. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons. [selection: pp. 1-52; 165-222]

Forgas, J. P. (1994). The role of emotion in social judgments: An introductory review and an Affect Infusion Model (AIM). European Journal of Social Psychology, 24(1), 1-24.

Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. Miswanting. To appear in J. Forgas (Ed.), Thinking and feeling: the role of affect in social cognition.

 

TBA/Student presentations 12/17/98