Large-scale brain networks in affective and social neuroscience: towards an integrative functional architecture of the brain

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2012.12.012Get rights and content

Understanding how a human brain creates a human mind ultimately depends on mapping psychological categories and concepts to physical measurements of neural response. Although it has long been assumed that emotional, social, and cognitive phenomena are realized in the operations of separate brain regions or brain networks, we demonstrate that it is possible to understand the body of neuroimaging evidence using a framework that relies on domain general, distributed structure–function mappings. We review current research in affective and social neuroscience and argue that the emerging science of large-scale intrinsic brain networks provides a coherent framework for a domain-general functional architecture of the human brain.

Highlights

► Phenomena in affective, social, and cognitive neuroscience cannot be specifically localized to distinct brain regions or brain networks. ► Affective, social, and cognitive phenomena arise from the interaction of domain-general, distributed functional networks. ► We review the functional roles of “salience”, “mentalizing”, and “mirroring” networks. ► This “constructionist” functional architecture provides a valid level of description for brain imaging data.

Section snippets

Affective neuroscience: the nature of emotion

In the field of affective neuroscience, no topic has received more attention than the brain basis of emotion. Until recently, scientists were largely convinced that anger, fear, sadness, happiness, and disgust, as emotional faculties, arise from separate, innate, culturally universal neural modules in the brain (for a review see [5••, 9••]). In the typical brain imaging study of emotion, participants are asked to cultivate an emotional experience from viewing images or movies, by remembering

Social neuroscience: person perception and the self

In the domain of social neuroscience, a key question concerns how one person's mind creates the perception of another person as having intentions, beliefs, morals, traits, and so on. Much of this research has been guided by prominent social cognition theories developed in the 1980s and 1990s, referring to these abilities as ‘person perception’, ‘mind perception’, ‘ordinary personology’, or ‘mental state attribution’ [56, 57, 58, 59]. Although early research in social neuroscience attempted to

A constructionist functional architecture of the brain

Figure 2 summarizes the transition in human neuroscience research away from the search for domain-specific neural modules towards the discovery of large-scale, domain general networks that are distributed in both their structure and function. There are three take-away hypotheses from this figure. First, a psychological faculty, such as fear, or the ability to perceive the traits or mental states of another person (or other faculties we have not discussed here, such as working memory [87]), is

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

Acknowledgments

We thank Paul Gade, Ian Kleckner, and Ralph Adolphs for their comments on an earlier version of this manuscript, and Tal Yakoni for his assistance with using NeuroSynth to construct Figure 1, Alexandra Touroutoglou for her assistance with constructing the figure accompanying Box 2, and Aaron Scott for his assistance in constructing Figure 1, Figure 2. Preparation of this manuscript was supported by a National Institute of Health Director's Pioneer Award (DP1OD003312) and by the U.S. Army

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