Social and Affective Neuroscience
Summary
Social and affective neuroscience investigates how brain systems give rise to our capacity to perceive, interpret and respond to social and emotional information. It spans processes such as recognising others’ expressions and intentions, generating and regulating affective states, and using emotional cues to guide social decisions. Core themes include mapping the neural circuits that support social memory, examining how neuromodulators like oxytocin influence social affiliation and trust, and identifying how patterns of brain activity predict individual differences in emotion regulation and social behaviour. A multi-level framework links neural dynamics in regions such as the amygdala, ventral striatum and prefrontal cortex to affective experience, and from there to motivated actions in both cooperative and competitive contexts. Disruptions in these circuits underlie conditions ranging from mood disorders to autism, highlighting both fundamental and clinical significance.
Research from Nature Portfolio
A global field experiment investigated whether brief, web-based reappraisal instructions could modulate emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 35,000 participants in 87 countries, two distinct reappraisal exercises reliably reduced self-reported negative affect and increased positive affect, without reducing intentions to engage in recommended health behaviours. These findings demonstrate that simple, scalable interventions can harness cognitive reappraisal to promote emotional resilience at global scale.
A comprehensive review in Nature Reviews Psychology synthesises evidence on emotion regulation across psychopathologies. It finds that inflexible reliance on avoidance, rumination and suppression characterises a broad range of mental disorders, whereas the capacity to deploy adaptive strategies (notably reappraisal and acceptance) predicts better outcomes. Crucially, the review shows that individuals with mental illness are not uniformly unable to reappraise; rather, they often under-utilise these techniques, suggesting targets for transdiagnostic therapies.
Social and Affective Neuroscience publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in social and affective neuroscience across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Affective salience: The property of a stimulus that signals its emotional relevance, engaging specialised brain circuits.
Cognitive reappraisal: A strategy of reframing the meaning of an emotion-eliciting situation to alter its affective impact.
Functional connectivity: Statistical dependencies between activity in distinct brain regions, reflecting coordinated neural networks.
Oscillatory synchrony: The phase-locked rhythmic coordination of neural activity across regions, important for information integration.
Point-light display: A minimal-cue stimulus in which motion is depicted by lights at joints, used to study biological motion perception.
Transdiagnostic: Pertaining to mechanisms or interventions that apply across multiple psychiatric disorders rather than to a single diagnosis.
References
- A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Human Behaviour (2021).
- The role of emotion regulation in the characterization, development and treatment of psychopathology. Nature Reviews Psychology (2022).
- Interpersonal predictive coding, not action perception, is impaired in autism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (2016).
About these summaries
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