New Review on the Social Connectome

A new article by Lara Maliske and Philipp Kanske was published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, a spart of their Special Issue “Insights in Social Cognition”. In their mini review article, the authors give a short overview of recent studies from the field of (clinical) social neuroscience that describe the neural organization of social affect and cognition as a complex network. The reviewed studies demonstrate the added value of investigating the “social brain” as a complex, flexible, and dynamical system. As an example, this perspective allows to give a more detailed description of the relationship, but also the context-dependency of this relationship, between social processes (empathy, Theory of Mind), and investigate the malleability of these processes further. Furthermore, clinical studies can show the surplus of adopting a network-based perspective for the prediction of long-term outcome or the classification of patient subgroups. The authors call for a stronger emphasis on a network-based perspective in the investigation of how the brain represents social processes, in order to show a more holistic account of the “social brain”.

The article can be found here.