Introduction

Social Neuroscience refers to how the brain mediates social cognition, interpersonal exchanges, affective/cognitive group interactions, and related topics that deal with social/personality psychology. In the past few years, several neuroscience disciplines have emerged, giving the brain a key role in the knowledge about behaviour. This new area of cognitive sciences searches to explain the neural bases of “human higher cognitive” behaviours, political orientation and psychiatric phenotype. Because combining expertise from experimental neuroscience, psychiatry and philosophy will enable us to find new ways of studying higher cognitive processes in the brain, this conference will feature speakers from a wide variety of disciplines.

The plan for the conference is to create the appropriate environment to discuss social neuroscience, its functional neuroimaging and clinical approach. Developments in functional imaging have revealed neurofunctional correlates of various behavioural traits, subjective states and experiences, and diagnoses or pathologies. The understanding of psychiatric and neurobehavioural pathologies from a neurocognitive perspective created the opportunity to have a language in common and contrastable results with neuroimaging. At the same time, this has given origin to new ways of representing these subjective state and pathologies and have created new ‘objects’ (e.g., functional brain images, hyperactive or hypoactive brain areas, discussion on localisation vs. neuronal networks) that can be integrated in thinking about human behaviour, diagnoses and experiences. We expect to discuss the limitations of experimentation in modern neuroimaging and behaviour – and to discuss its contextualisation in contemporary society, the uses and practices to which it is put, and the way in which this science affects policy and everyday life.

Symposium Recap Video

International Guest speakers

INECO's  4th Anniversary - Satellite Symposium
Tuesday, November 17th - INECO's Auditorium