Chapter 1: Introduction to Social Neuroscience
The Sentis Brain Animation Series takes you on a tour of the brain
Chris Frith: How the Brain Creates Culture
The Social Brain: Ralph Adolphs at TEDxCaltech
Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks (including how obesity may be socially contagious)
VS Ramachandran: TED India talk on ‘The neurons that shaped civilization’
Joan Chiao: Cultural Neuroscience: Bridging Cultural and Biological Sciences
Russell Poldrack: From Reverse Inference to Pattern Classification
Lisa Feldman Barrett: Models of the Mind symposium
Randy Buckner: Models of the Mind symposium
Randy Buckner, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Amanda Pustilnik: Models of the Mind panel discussion
Chapter 2: The Methods of Social Neuroscience
Introductory neuroscience and brain anatomy
The structure and function of neurons shown in a simple video clip
The Nervous System, Part 1: Crash Course
- Free online Fundamentals of Neuroscience module from Harvard University
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- Check out the 3D Brain App from Google Play, or Neuroanatomy online
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- MRI brain atlas allows you to navigate through slices of normal and damaged brains
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Electrophysiological Methods
Jamie Ward’s Cognitive Neuroscience Bitesize tutorial on EEG and event-related potential basics
- An interview with Professor Horace Barlow who conducted seminal work on how neurons code visual information and who introduced the concept of grandmother cells
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Learn more about the discovery of the Jennifer Aniston Neuron and its implications
- Professor Steve Luck’s youtube channel relating to ERP analysis - for researchers who will gain hands-on experience
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- Virtual ERP Bootcamp - Introduction to the event-related potential technique, designed for students and researchers with little or no prior ERP experience
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- Introduction to magnetoencephalography (MEG) recorded at MIT
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Functional Imaging (fMRI)
Jamie Ward’s Cognitive Neuroscience Bitesize tutorial on fMRI Basics
Jamie Ward’s Cognitive Neuroscience Bitesize tutorial on connectivity measures in MRI
Read Montague: What we're learning from 5,000 brains
TEDx talk by Professor David van Essen on “The Human Connectome Project - Relating Brain Circuits to Behavior”
Human brain mapping and brain decoding. | Jack Gallant | TEDxSanFrancisco
Lectures given by Professor Geoffrey Aguirre on the physics and biology of fMRI, with three other lectures as parts of this series covering various other issues about study design and analysis in fMRI.
Lesion methods and brain stimulation
Jamie Ward’s Cognitive Neuroscience Bitesize tutorial on Non-invasive brain stimulation
- Professor Elizabeth Warrington: The history of neuropsychology
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A demonstration of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
A series of lectures at UCDavis on brain stimulation, particularly, the newer method of tDCS
Chapter 3: Evolutionary Origins of Social Intelligence and Culture
Social intelligence
Robin Dunbar: Can the internet buy you more friends?
Robin Dunbar: Social brain theory and on what it is to be human and how it is that we came to be that way
The Social Origins of Intelligence | Prof. Cecilia Heyes
Culture and social learning in non-human animals
Culture in Japanese macaques? Demonstration of sweet potato washing and separating rice from sand
Michael Tomasello - Intentional Communication of Great Apes
Professor Michael Tomasello: Do Chimpanzees have a Theory of Mind?
Moral behavior in animals | Frans de Waal
Human and Non-Human Cultures -- Andrew Whiten
Social Learning and Traditions in Wild Capuchin Monkeys – Susan Perry
Cultures of the Open Ocean: The Sperm Whale – Hal Whitehead
Are some birds as clever as chimps?
Imitation and mirror neurons
Cecilia Heyes: Cultural Evolutionary Psychology, Imitation, And Mindreading
Giacomo Rizzolatti: Mirror neurons: from monkey to human
Vittorio Gallese and Gregory Hickok: Debate: ‘Do Mirror Neurons Explain Anything?’
Chapter 4: Emotion and motivation
What are emotions?
Lectures on emotion by Professors Lisa Feldman-Barret and Paul Ekman as part of the Experts in Emotion series
Feldman-Barret’s TED talk on ‘You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions’
Paul Ekman: Do We All Have the Same Basic Emotions?
Paul Ekman: What is an emotion?
Antonio Damasio: How Our Brains Feel Emotion
Jaak Panksepp: Science of emotion
Edmund Rolls: ‘On the rules of cortical wiring and function, with implications for understanding psychiatric disorders’
Fear and emotional learning
Ivan Pavlov: Classical conditioning
Vicarious learning of fear conditioning
Joseph Le Doux: Lecture on the Emotional Brain
Elizabeth Phelps: Changing fear
The Iowa Gambling Task explained by David Eagleman
Pleasure and motivation
Morten Kringelbach: The joyful mind: the neuroscience of pleasure and happiness
Kent Berridge - Delight, Desire, and Dread: Generators in the Brain
Emotion regulation
James Gross: Emotion regulation
Kevin Ochsner: Emotion regulation and the brain
Roy Baumeister: Self-regulation and emotion
Chapter 5: Reading Faces and Bodies
Interactive demonstrations
Face and body recognition in the brain
Nancy Kanwisher: A neural portrait of the human mind
Short clip of a woman with prosopagnosia – the inability to recognize faces
In this clip we see a Capgras’ delusion patient, a condition presumably caused by impaired connections between the visual areas of the temporal lobe and the amygdala
Malinda Carpenter - A New Look at Joint Attention and Common Knowledge
Inferring traits from faces
David Perrett: In your face
Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions - Dr. Alexander Todorov
Chapter 6: Understanding Others
Empathy
David Eagleman What is Empathy
Tania Singer: The Neuroscience of Compassion
Mirror Neurons The Smart Cells | Marco Iacoboni
Anat Perry-Sharon: How Brain Mechanisms Enable Our Understanding of Others
Paul Bloom - Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
Mind-reading
Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds
The ‘False Belief’ Test: Theory of Mind
Heider and Simmel animation of anthropomorphic thinking
Autism
Uta Frith: Autism: The First Fifty Years
Simon Baron Cohen: Male brains, autism, genes and culture
Temple Grandin: The Autistic Brain (a first-person account by a leading neurodiversity advocate)
Mirror neurons and EEG mu suppression in autism
Chapter 7: Interacting with Others
Fairness and ‘equal pay’
TED talk by Professor Sarah Brosnan on ‘Why monkeys (and humans) are wired for fairness’
Two Monkeys Were Paid Unequally: Excerpt from Frans de Waal's TED Talk
Unequal payment for the same job in dogs – a fun demonstration
Altruism and helping others
‘The mathematics of evolution, altruism and human behaviour’ Professor Martin Nowak.
Robert Axelrod interviewed on Game Theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Richard Dawkins on Altruism and The Selfish Gene
Warren Holmes: The Evolution of Cooperation and the Paradox of Altruism
Daniel Batson: Empathy Induced Altruism
Toddler Altruism – a demonstration
Neuroeconomics and social decision making
Colin Camerer on ‘When you're making a deal, what's going on in your brain?’
Alan Sanfey: Social Emotions Matter
Molly Crockett on ‘Why Your Brain Loves Feeling Outraged and Punishing People's Bad Behavior’
- A resource for educators and students of game theory
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Brain Power: Science of Neuroeconomics Presented by Michael Platt
Neuroeconomics and the Future of the Decision Sciences with Paul Glimcher
Chapter 8: Relationships
Love
Helen Fisher: TED talk on Why we love, why we cheat
The Science of Relationships: From Romance to Rejection (panel discussion with Thomas Bradbury, Naomi Eisenberger, and Jaana Juvonen)
- On Birds Flocking and Opposites Attracting: The data on Love (audio-only podcast)
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Attachment
The Strange Situation Test – Infant attachment style demonstration
Food or Security? Harlow's study on monkeys' attachment (may be upsetting for some people)
Animal Studies of Attachment (Lorenz and Harlow)
Larry Young: The Reward System includes Vasopressin and Oxytocin
Oxytocin – Demonstration of Prairie Vole Partner Preference Experiment
Larry Young: The chemistry between us TEDx talk
Paul Zak: Trust, morality, and oxytocin TEDx talk
Separation and loneliness
Social Pain and Physical Pain with Naomi Eisnenberger and Matthew Lieberman
John Cacioppo: Connected Minds: Loneliness, Social Brains and the Need for Community
Chapter 9: Groups and identity
Stanford prison experiment
Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment
The Self
Virtual out-of-body experience - demonstration
Neuroscience and Free Will – Demonstration of Libet's Experiment
Debate on ‘the self’ (how the Self is shaped by interactions with the environment, how free will, responsibility, and other traits emerge, and how character and virtue become targets for constructing the Self)
Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs memory (Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently)
Prejudice and bias
Implicit Association Test – Demonstration and interviews with the developers of the test
- Try the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for yourself
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Is your brain racist? David Amodio explains.
Paul Bloom: Can prejudice ever be a good thing?
Susan T. Fiske: Ambivalent Stereotypes Support Inequality and Conflict - or Peace
Elizabeth A. Phelps presents Race Bias, Decisions, and the Brain
Mahzarin Banaji and Rebecca Saxe: A discussion on bias and prejudice
David Amodio: Social categories in the face
Chapter 10: Morality and Antisocial Behaviour
Morality
Trolley and Footbridge Dilemmas – video demonstration
Jonathan Haidt on ‘The moral roots of liberals and conservatives’
- The New Science of Morality – a set of conversations with leading thinkers in social neuroscience
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