Areas of Social Neuroscience Research at NYU

The following topics represent the major research foci faculty affiliates. In each area, we study the interplay of psychological process and neural mechanism.

Emotion 

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Center members study emotion processes at multiple levels of analysis. Research includes studies of cellular and molecular mechanisms of fear learning in animal models, neural mechanisms involved in the social learning of fear, neural substrates of reward during bargaining games, social anxiety during intergroup interactions, social emotions such as guilt and shame linked to social relationships, and emotion effects on goal pursuit.

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Social Cognition and Intergroup Processes 

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Social cognition refers to a set of processes through which social information is represented in the mind and expressed in behavior via automatic and controlled processes. Intergroup processes refer the way that members of groups are categorized and represented, and how these representations relate to stereotypes and prejudices, which in turn may influence social behavior.

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Motivation 

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Research on motivation focuses on the neural processes through which motivations influence the perception of social targets and how goal strategies function automatically to promote intentional behavior.

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Visual Processes in Social Perception 

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Visual perception plays an important role in social interactions, from the initial encoding of a face to the binding of visual information across time within a social episode.

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Social Memory 

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Memory for social information, including information about social hierarchy, social affiliations, mating preferences, trait impressions, is often privileged among social organisms. Our faculty examine the neural basis of learning and memory as it relates to these and other social processes.

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Political Ideology 

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Our faculty are seeking to identify and understand liberal-conservative differences in neurological structure and function, and how differences in political ideology are associated with sensitivity to threat, need for closure, and more.

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