Social Neuroscience: How Researchers Study the Social Brain

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Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: October 12, 2026 · Editorial Policy

Social neuroscience investigates how neural, physiological, and biological processes participate in social perception, communication, relationships, group behavior, and interaction. Its central question is how organisms perceive and respond to other organisms, and how social environments, experience, and institutions in turn shape the nervous system. Researchers move between behavior, cognitive models, brain measurements, hormones, development, and social context. The field is therefore best understood as a multilevel research program, not a map of isolated “social centers” in the brain. Foundational definitions emphasize reciprocal influences across biological and social levels (Cacioppo and Decety, 2011; Decety and Leong, 2025).

What is social neuroscience?

Social neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of biological mechanisms associated with social processes and the reciprocal relations between those mechanisms and social environments. The term covers work on facial expressions, eye gaze, intentional action, cooperation, empathy, social learning, affiliation, rejection, communication, intergroup relationships, and real-time encounters. A typical study defines a social process in observable terms, contrasts relevant conditions, measures behavior and physiology, and tests predictions about underlying mechanisms. Biological evidence supplements, constrains, and sometimes changes the psychological account.

Social cognitive neuroscience is a closely related emphasis within this field. It examines how people represent themselves and others, reason about beliefs and intentions, respond to social information, and regulate social behavior using methods associated with cognitive neuroscience. Lieberman's influential review organized social cognitive work around understanding others, understanding oneself, self-regulation, and the interface between self and others (Lieberman, 2007). Social neuroscience can also include animal behavior, endocrine responses, immune processes, developmental pathways, and the organization of interacting groups.

A useful starting distinction concerns the research question. Social psychology studies social influence, attitudes, identities, relationships, and behavior across individuals and groups. Social neuroscience asks how biological processes participate in these phenomena, while retaining psychological measurement and social-context explanations. The neural-circuits perspective offers the relevant biological framework: interacting populations and distributed networks support flexible behavior rather than a one-region/one-trait correspondence. Comprehensive psychological accounts of conformity, prejudice, attraction, social support, or group identity belong to social psychology; here, those topics serve as examples of neuroscientific questions.

How did the field develop?

Research on brain injury, emotion, perception, animal social behavior, electrophysiology, hormones, and interpersonal influence predates the formal label. The term social neuroscience gained a defined interdisciplinary meaning in the early 1990s, particularly through the proposal by Cacioppo and Berntson to examine behavior across interacting levels of organization. Growing access to PET and then fMRI enabled researchers to ask which neural systems change during judgments of faces, intentions, self-relevance, or others' feelings. Subsequent EEG, lesion, intracranial-recording, and comparative studies increased temporal and mechanistic detail (Cacioppo and Decety, 2011; Lieberman, 2007).

Early scanner experiments often presented a single participant with photographs, stories, or prerecorded videos. Those experiments helped establish reproducible task contrasts, yet observing a face is different from participating in a conversation where both people continually change one another's behavior. The second-person neuroscience approach arose in part to examine these reciprocal situations directly. Interactive paradigms, shared tasks, virtual agents, and simultaneous recordings from partners now supplement individual-observer designs (Schilbach et al., 2013; Redcay and Schilbach, 2019).

The field's contemporary challenge is integration. Researchers can describe neural activity during specific experimental tasks with increasing precision, but translating those results into models of everyday relationships requires convergent measurements, ecological validity, longitudinal evidence, and serious attention to language, culture, development, and social structures.

What does “the social brain” mean?

The social brain is a research shorthand for interacting neural systems recruited during social perception, learning, evaluation, communication, and action. It is not one anatomical organ or a fixed list of exclusively social regions. The same region may contribute to memory, language, prediction, valuation, attention, and non-social control tasks. Brain networks are dynamic: their involvement depends on what the person is doing, what information is available, what has been learned, and the study's comparison condition.

Social-neuroscience maps repeatedly implicate medial prefrontal regions, temporal and temporoparietal cortex, superior temporal sulcus, posterior midline cortex, insula, anterior cingulate, amygdala, and striatal circuits. This pattern is informative at the level of tasks and networks, while individual region labels require caution. A 2024 meta-analysis comparing 344 neuroimaging studies found overlap between theory-of-mind tasks and semantic cognition in anterior temporal and temporoparietal regions, alongside some additional patterns more specific to mentalizing contrasts. The result supports a mixed account in which social judgments recruit both relatively specialized and domain-general systems (2024 meta-analysis).

Mentalizing and perspective-taking networks

Mentalizing, often studied through theory-of-mind tasks, refers to reasoning about another person's beliefs, goals, knowledge, or intentions. Researchers might contrast stories requiring belief attribution with stories matched for reading demands but requiring fewer mental-state judgments. Across task families, the temporoparietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and posterior temporal regions frequently contribute. Their involvement does not mean a brain scan directly identifies the content of a participant's beliefs; task design and behavioral evidence are necessary to interpret the contrast. Reviews show meaningful variation according to whether tasks involve goals, stories, agents, ages, and types of social scenes (Gan et al., 2024).

Mentalizing also relies on memory, language comprehension, semantic knowledge, executive demands, and prior experience. An adult interpreting a friend's silence uses context and relationship history, not a dedicated module that operates independently of the rest of cognition. This is why researchers test multiple theories—specialized social representations, general semantic inference, and distributed predictive computation—rather than assuming that activation at the temporoparietal junction establishes any one mechanism.

Social perception: faces, gaze, movement, and voices

Recognizing social cues involves visual and auditory processing along with attention, learned associations, and contextual inference. Regions along the superior temporal sulcus may be recruited by changing facial expressions, eye movements, biological motion, and observed actions. Ventral visual regions participate in face processing and recognition, while broader networks integrate the identity of a person with memory, meaning, and social expectations.

A face photograph can test controlled perceptual discrimination, but its meaning depends on the viewer's task, prior knowledge, and surroundings. Looking at an angry expression while rating age, judging emotion, or planning a response places different demands on processing. Researchers therefore need matched stimuli, clear tasks, and independent behavioral checks before saying what any regional effect indicates.

Salience, emotion, and bodily responses

The amygdala contributes to evaluating biologically and motivationally significant information and learning about uncertain or salient events. Describing it as a pure fear center ignores its wider roles. The insula contributes to the integration of bodily information and task significance; cingulate regions support multiple forms of monitoring and action coordination. Autonomic responses—heart-rate changes, sweating, pupil size, and respiration—can accompany social challenge or engagement but are influenced by many processes. These signals gain interpretive meaning through the experimental context.

Network-based explanations of emotion, learning, and regulation are developed in Neural Basis of Emotion: Brain Networks, Learning, and Regulation. For social neuroscience, the key question is which components of appraisal, attention, memory, preparation, and action are recruited under a defined social condition, and how their timing relates to observed behavior.

Reward, valuation, cooperation, and learning

The striatum and connected prefrontal circuits contribute to evaluating outcomes, updating expectations, selecting actions, and learning from feedback. Social feedback, including approval, reciprocity, reputation, or exclusion, can recruit computations related to value and prediction. Yet a striatal response does not establish that someone feels pleasure, loves a partner, or has a fixed motivation. Reward studies must separate anticipation from outcome, expected from unexpected events, and valuation from general arousal or action demands.

Social learning experiments may manipulate a partner's reliability or willingness to cooperate and then model how choices change across repeated encounters. Researchers compare proposed learning rules with observed choices, response timing, and relevant signals. Such models explain selected task features, and their usefulness outside that task depends on replication and external validation.

What questions do social neuroscientists actually test?

Understanding intentions and beliefs

A participant might watch two agents act toward one another and infer whether a mistake reflects an accident, ignorance, or deliberate intent. The study may measure accuracy, response time, gaze patterns, and brain responses while varying available information. When two conditions differ only in an experimentally controlled mental-state demand, a difference in measured activity can support an association between the contrast and the recruited system. Alternative accounts—language complexity, surprise, memory, and difficulty—must still be tested.

Empathy and responses to other people's experiences

Empathy is studied through partly distinct processes: recognizing another person's emotional state, sharing affective features, taking their perspective, and choosing an appropriate response. These processes overlap in many settings but should not be treated as identical. A meta-analytic connectivity study of 140 investigations found that more complex social tasks can jointly recruit networks often associated with empathy and mentalizing (Maliske, Schurz, and Kanske, 2023). This convergence suggests integration during demanding situations without proving a single empathy circuit or offering a direct measurement of compassion.

A newer quantitative comparison also found both shared recruitment and limited direct overlap between some mentalizing/empathy contrasts and active interaction tasks, illustrating how analytic definition and task selection shape the reported map (2025 quantitative review). The practical scientific lesson is to specify whether a result concerns perception, subjective feeling, explicit inference, helping behavior, or coordinated interaction.

Trust, reputation, norms, and group processes

Trust games, bargaining tasks, cooperation dilemmas, and reputation manipulations let researchers examine choices and neural responses under controlled social incentives. A participant may transfer resources to a partner, observe the partner's return, and decide whether to cooperate again. The resulting behavior can be analyzed with models of expectations, risk, social preference, and feedback learning. Intergroup studies add group membership, social norms, and learned associations, frequently using behavioral tasks, EEG event-related potentials, and fMRI.

A major review of prejudice research shows how neuroscience can contribute to questions about categorization, stereotype updating, perception, and behavioral control (Amodio and Cikara, 2021). Neural measurements alone cannot establish that an individual holds a specific prejudice. A meaningful investigation tests psychological constructs directly and recognizes how cultural and institutional conditions influence the measured behavior.

Social connection, exclusion, and relationships

Researchers study loneliness, affiliation, social support, attachment, and perceived exclusion using questionnaires, experimental feedback, physiological measures, repeated daily assessments, and sometimes neuroimaging. These constructs differ: feeling lonely is a subjective appraisal, physical isolation is an observable circumstance, and exclusion in a laboratory game is a particular experimental manipulation. Treating them as interchangeable weakens conclusions.

Social interaction and health can be associated across many studies, but an imaging contrast does not establish that one region causes loneliness or predicts the course of an individual relationship. Researchers must consider baseline health, socioeconomic conditions, prior stress, personality, selection effects, and temporal ordering. The scientific focus remains on mechanisms and measurable trajectories, not neural labels for the quality of a relationship.

How do researchers measure the social brain?

The strongest studies combine behavioral tasks with one or more biological techniques. Each instrument measures a specific signal, and every signal has a distinct relation to neural processing. The brain-imaging methods guide compares the general measurement principles; the distinctions below show what they mean in a social experiment.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Functional MRI commonly measures blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal changes related to local hemodynamics. Researchers can compare signals while participants infer another person's intention, observe social cues, or anticipate cooperation. Whole-brain coverage and useful spatial resolution make fMRI attractive for testing distributed systems. Its signal is indirect, its time course is constrained by vascular physiology, and it cannot identify individual thoughts from an activation peak.

Scanner restrictions, motion artifacts, task selection, and many analytic choices limit the generality of social interpretations. Neurovascular signals are also affected by physiological conditions. Strong claims require contrasts designed to distinguish competing explanations, appropriate control for multiple comparisons, and replication across samples.

Electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials

EEG records changes in electrical potential at the scalp arising substantially from coordinated postsynaptic activity in neural populations. It provides millisecond-scale information about the timing of stimulus and response processing, which is valuable for social cue detection, expectancy violations, and dynamic interaction. Averaged event-related potentials summarize voltage changes time-locked to events, but their components are shaped by overlapping processes and the chosen analysis.

Scalp EEG has limited spatial localization and is vulnerable to eye movements, facial muscle activity, movement, and environmental noise. Researchers should not equate an observed rhythm or an ERP amplitude with a single psychological trait, emotional state, or diagnostic condition.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy uses light to estimate changes in oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin within relatively superficial cortical tissue. Portable recording allows more movement and reciprocal conversation than conventional scanner environments. This makes fNIRS useful in parent–child tasks, classroom-like activities, and interactive cooperation experiments. Its signal remains vascular and indirect; depth coverage, hair, scalp physiology, probe placement, and systemic changes complicate interpretation.

Magnetic recordings, PET, lesions, and stimulation

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) records extremely small magnetic fields generated by coordinated neural currents, allowing high temporal resolution with source-localization assumptions. Positron emission tomography (PET) detects radiation from administered tracers and may estimate aspects of metabolism or molecular binding; it does not directly read emotions or thoughts. Lesion studies examine functional consequences of neurological damage but face challenges of lesion extent, network adaptation, and lesion-location correlation. Research neurostimulation can perturb selected circuits under controlled conditions and strengthen causal tests, although stimulation rarely targets just one computation. These methods complement one another rather than yielding interchangeable definitions of “activity.”

Hormones, autonomic measurements, and behavior

Salivary cortisol, autonomic measures, pupil diameter, and peripheral hormonal assays can add information about stress-related physiology or task engagement. However, circulating concentrations do not simply reveal synaptic signaling within the brain. Oxytocin, for example, participates in multiple physiological and behavioral processes and varies with context; the popular “love hormone” formula is inadequate to interpret a result. Measurements are strongest when researchers specify collection time, relevant bodily processes, individual variation, and experimentally predicted behavioral outcomes.

A complete study may also include eye tracking, speech timing, conversational turn-taking, individual differences, cultural context, questionnaires, and computational models. These measurements are often the most direct evidence for the social phenomenon itself.

Social neuroscience in real interaction: second-person methods

A major methodological distinction separates observation of social stimuli from reciprocal social participation. In a conventional first-person experiment, someone watches a prerecorded face or decides what a fictional character believes. In a second-person paradigm, another person responds in real time; the participant's own actions change the next social event. Researchers can manipulate turn-taking, contingency, information asymmetry, mutual gaze, cooperation, or partner feedback while recording behavior and physiology.

Second-person approaches improve the correspondence between laboratory tasks and everyday interaction, but increase complexity: participants influence one another, experimental control becomes harder, and signals are affected by shared sensory input and movement. Redcay and Schilbach describe this transition as an important expansion rather than proof that one methodological class can replace all others (Redcay and Schilbach, 2019). Controlled observation remains especially useful when a precise perceptual or cognitive contrast is needed.

What is hyperscanning?

Hyperscanning means recording neural or brain-related signals from at least two participants during the same task or interaction. EEG, fNIRS, and in some designs fMRI can be used. Investigators then examine within-person responses and statistical relationships across participants over time. A review of the method describes its advantages for coordination research and the need to distinguish measurement type, signal-processing choices, and analytic goals (Czeszumski et al., 2020).

Interpersonal neural synchrony is a statistical association in the timing or structure of measured signals across people. It may accompany joint attention, turn-taking, similar sensory input, rhythmic behavior, shared movement, or interaction-specific coordination. It does not show that the two brains have merged, that private thoughts were transmitted, or that a relationship is intrinsically healthy. Shared stimuli and common physiology can generate correlations even without a direct interpersonal neural mechanism.

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of 17 fNIRS hyperscanning studies covering 1,149 dyads reported interpersonal synchronization effects in close-relationship interactions (Zhao et al., 2024). The synthesis documents a recurring measured phenomenon within the sampled studies. Differences in tasks, participant ages, preprocessing, temporal alignment, and control conditions restrict strong universal or causal claims. A 2025 review of environmental manipulations identified only seven eligible experiments and found that interpersonal distance, music, noise, and virtual reality can affect coupling estimates (Leahy et al., 2025). This directly illustrates why context and alternative sources of synchrony matter.

For stronger inference, investigators can compare true pairs with shuffled pairs, explicitly model common stimuli and movement, manipulate reciprocity, and ask whether synchrony predicts independently measured cooperative performance after confounds are considered. Even then, correlation between brain signals is evidence about recorded covariation, while causal claims require additional experimental leverage.

What does the current scientific evidence establish?

There is strong convergent support for the general claim that social tasks recruit identifiable, distributed neural systems. Repeated reviews and meta-analyses demonstrate structured associations between task classes and brain-network activity, including mentalizing, semantic retrieval, empathy-related processing, and interaction. Lesion and perturbation findings provide more specific tests for selected components. The strongest conclusions identify constrained functions within particular experimental conditions, not permanent psychological labels for an individual.

There is moderate and task-dependent support for some distinctions between observing an interaction and actively participating in one. Second-person paradigms reveal changes in task demands, behavioral contingencies, and neural recruitment, but designs differ and broad generalizations need replication. Redcay and Schilbach synthesize the rationale and methodological evidence. Meta-analytic differences across task families reinforce the value of carefully defined phenomena.

Evidence from hyperscanning supports the existence of measurable interpersonal covariation during many cooperative and relational tasks. The causal significance, selectivity, universality, and predictive value of that covariation are still being established. Research frequently remains exploratory, uses modest samples, or combines heterogeneous preprocessing and analysis pipelines. Neuroscience cannot replace direct reports, behavioral observations, and longitudinal evidence when studying relationships or health.

No current brain measurement provides a validated universal test of empathy, trustworthiness, prejudice, compatibility, social competence, or the quality of attachment in an individual. Group-level effects are often distributions with extensive overlap, and a successful experimental classifier still needs validation on independent populations and real-world settings before becoming a reliable individual-level tool.

How can a social-neuroscience finding be misinterpreted?

Reverse inference: “the region lit up, so the person felt X”

Reverse inference moves from a regional response to a claim about a psychological state without demonstrating that the region responds selectively to that state. If a structure participates in attention, memory, learning, valuation, and emotional relevance, observing its activation cannot uniquely identify fear, love, dishonesty, or empathy. Poldrack's methodological analysis formalizes why the selectivity of a brain measure is essential to the strength of an inference (Poldrack, 2006).

Correlation, causation, and the unit of analysis

A significant association between a neural measurement and a self-report score does not establish the direction of influence. Social environments shape development and behavior; behavior also changes the environments people enter; physiological responses evolve over time. Randomized manipulations, longitudinal measurement, and causal interventions can strengthen specific claims. The unit of analysis matters as well: correlated observations across members of one dyad should not be treated as independent participants.

Small samples and analytical flexibility

A colorful brain map can conceal low statistical power, imperfect task controls, flexible region selection, and multiple testing. Researchers need preregistered hypotheses where feasible, transparent preprocessing, robust correction for multiple comparisons, effect sizes, uncertainty intervals, independent replication, and access to materials or analytic code. An attractive narrative should follow the design's explanatory limits.

Culture, development, and ecological validity

Social signals are interpreted within learned languages, roles, relationships, and norms. A response to direct eye contact, group identification, or emotional expression can change across cultural contexts, developmental stages, social positions, and situational demands. Convenient university samples rarely represent humanity. Translating tightly controlled studies into universal claims about “how people bond” or “how the social brain works” requires broader sampling and naturalistic replication.

Animal evidence and translation

Animal studies make invasive recording, molecular interventions, and detailed circuit manipulations possible. They can reveal mechanisms of social approach, vocalization, affiliation, or competition within the studied species. Homologous anatomy and shared signaling pathways offer valuable hypotheses about humans, but species-specific ecology, language, institutions, and meaning prevent automatic transfer of a particular behavioral interpretation.

Does social neuroscience explain autism or mental health conditions?

Research on social processing is relevant to neurodevelopmental and psychiatric science, but experimental findings should be separated from diagnostic criteria and established clinical interventions. A difference in mean neural response between a patient group and a comparison group may reflect task strategy, medication, developmental experience, stress, movement, sampling, or the condition under investigation. It does not by itself diagnose a person or demonstrate an underlying cause.

Social variation includes strengths, needs, context-sensitive differences, and multiple ways to communicate. Investigators should avoid interpreting all departures from a research-group average as impairment. Autism, social anxiety disorder, depression, psychotic disorders, and other clinical subjects have distinct diagnostic and care frameworks owned by their respective evidence bases. An individual fMRI activation pattern, EEG rhythm, or hyperscanning synchrony score is not a recognized standalone diagnostic test for such conditions.

For clinical applications, predictive models require prespecified outcomes, independent external testing, calibration, evidence of utility beyond ordinary assessment, subgroup analysis, and assessment of harms. Claims about using neurofeedback, oxytocin, or brain stimulation to improve general social functioning require intervention-specific randomized evidence rather than extrapolation from neural correlates.

What about social interaction with AI systems?

Digital interaction and conversational AI create new experimentally manipulable social environments. Researchers can vary an artificial partner's response latency, contingency, conversational framing, avatar, apparent agency, memory, and degree of reciprocity, then measure a human participant's judgments, behavior, and physiology. These experiments may clarify which human responses depend on perceived agency, feedback contingencies, or learned social expectations.

Human attachment, engagement, or trust toward a digital partner can be studied as human psychological phenomena. Brain responses to an agent do not independently settle whether the agent possesses subjective experience. Researchers should distinguish a participant's belief about a partner, the partner's observable behavior, and claims about the partner's internal state. The appropriate scope here is biological measurement of the human participant and the interaction; broader human–AI relationship theories belong to their own psychological research territory.

What can researchers and readers use these findings for?

For researchers, social neuroscience helps construct mechanistic hypotheses that can be evaluated across behavioral, physiological, and neural measurements. A strong experimental design begins with a precise social construct, specifies alternative explanations, chooses a method suited to the predicted temporal and spatial scale, and uses replication and convergent measures to refine the theory. Applied research can investigate classroom interaction, communication, rehabilitation, social inclusion, digital environments, and social-development trajectories, while testing concrete behavioral outcomes directly.

For readers, a useful question is: “What task was performed, what signal was measured, what comparison was made, and what alternative explanation was ruled out?” A paper measuring changes in blood oxygenation during cooperation says something different from a study tracking reciprocal choices, and both say something different from a clinical trial showing improved functioning. Evaluating them together is more informative than treating a brain image as a window into someone's private character.

Frequently asked questions

What is social neuroscience in simple terms?

It is the scientific study of how the nervous system and other biological processes participate in social behavior, and how social experiences influence biology. Researchers combine psychology, neuroscience, physiology, and experimental methods to examine specific, observable processes.

How is social neuroscience different from social psychology?

Social psychology primarily examines social judgments, interaction, and group processes at psychological and social levels. Social neuroscience examines associated biological mechanisms and their interaction with those levels. The two disciplines overlap and often answer complementary parts of the same question.

Is social cognitive neuroscience the same thing?

Social cognitive neuroscience is a closely related focus on representations, social perception, thinking about others, and self–other processing using cognitive-neuroscience methods. Social neuroscience is a broader umbrella that may also examine neuroendocrine, comparative, developmental, and interpersonal physiological mechanisms.

Where is the social brain located?

There is no single social-brain location. Social tasks commonly recruit distributed systems including prefrontal, temporal, temporoparietal, posterior midline, insular, striatal, and other circuits. Which elements participate depends on the task and the person's context and history.

Can fMRI show if someone is empathetic or lying?

A task-related BOLD difference cannot reliably establish a person's empathy, honesty, or precise mental state. Neuroimaging measures signals indirectly and task-specific group associations are not interchangeable with validated individual assessments.

Are mirror neurons the basis of empathy?

Research on observation and action-related neural responses contributes to explanations of some perception–action processes. Evidence does not establish that mirror neurons alone generate empathy, compassion, imitation, or social understanding. These constructs recruit several mechanisms and require behavioral operationalization.

What is the difference between EEG and fMRI in social research?

EEG records scalp electrical potentials and is particularly useful for millisecond-scale timing; localization is more constrained. fMRI measures blood-oxygen-related changes and is useful for mapping distributed systems, but neural events cannot be read directly from its slower vascular signal.

Does brain-to-brain synchronization mean two people share thoughts?

No. Synchronization describes statistical relations between measured signals. Similar visual or auditory inputs, aligned movements, and shared task structure can contribute. It does not demonstrate direct transmission of thoughts or prove closeness.

Can social neuroscience diagnose autism or mental disorders?

Research findings can motivate hypotheses about particular processes, but group-level neural associations are not established standalone clinical diagnostic tools. Diagnosis depends on validated clinical criteria, history, and appropriate assessment.

Why do researchers study real conversations rather than only pictures?

Interactive conversations involve mutual influence, timing, contingency, changing expectations, and coordinated behavior. Studying these features improves relevance to everyday life, while also making experimental control and interpretation more complex.

References

Amodio, D. M., & Cikara, M. (2021). The social neuroscience of prejudice. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 439–469. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010419-050928.

Cacioppo, J. T., & Decety, J. (2011). Social neuroscience: Challenges and opportunities in the study of complex behavior. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1224, 162–173. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05858.x.

Czeszumski, A., et al. (2020). Hyperscanning: A valid method to study neural inter-brain underpinnings of social interaction. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 14, 39. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00039.

Decety, J., & Leong, Y. C. (2025). Social neuroscience. In The Handbook of Social Psychology (6th ed.). Situational Press. https://doi.org/10.70400/CACC8406.

Gan, R., et al. (2024). Mapping the mentalizing brain: An ALE meta-analysis to differentiate the representation of social scenes and ages on theory of mind. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105918.

Leahy, O., et al. (2025). Environmental effects on inter-brain coupling: A systematic review. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40822293/.

Lieberman, M. D. (2007). Social cognitive neuroscience: A review of core processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 259–289. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.58.110405.085654.

Maliske, L. Z., Schurz, M., & Kanske, P. (2023). Interactions within the social brain: Co-activation and connectivity among networks enabling empathy and theory of mind. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 147, 105080. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105080.

Poldrack, R. A. (2006). Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 59–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.12.004.

Redcay, E., & Schilbach, L. (2019). Using second-person neuroscience to elucidate the mechanisms of social interaction. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 20, 495–505. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-019-0179-4.

Schilbach, L., et al. (2013). Toward a second-person neuroscience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 393–414. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000660.

Zhao, Q., Zhao, W., Lu, C., Du, H., & Chi, P. (2024). Interpersonal neural synchronization during social interactions in close relationships: A systematic review and meta-analysis of fNIRS hyperscanning studies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 158, 105565. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105565.

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