Starting September 2012

Department of Psychology from the faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences brings:

A minor program in Social Neuroscience

Innovations and rapid developments in social and biological sciences have recently founded Social Neuroscience, a discipline that attempts to integrate knowledge from a multiplicity of fields in order to develop new and fundamental insights into the neurobiology of human social behaviour. Social Neuroscience as such has the potential of bringing a better understanding of social behaviour, and in future successful treatment of socially deviant behaviours.

Social Neuroscience, one of the fastest growing fields of science, is a field that not only uses theories and methods insights from several branches of the social and neurosciences to understand the social brain, but also incorporates concepts and methods from medicine, economics, sociology, law and political sciences.

A variety of techniques are used in social neuroscience to study the influence of neural and social processes, in healthy and clinical cases including subjects with brain lesions. Not only sophisticated behavioral paradigms developed in among others social and cognitive psychology, and economics but also techniques such as structural and functional MRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation, hormonal measurements and manipulation, electroencephalography, event-related potentials, electrocardiograms, skin conductance responses and eye tracking.

The Utrecht University Social Neuroscience program is organized around four major themes:

(1) Social Cognition (including topics such as imitation, processing of social and emotional stimuli, social stereotyping, empathy, and perspective taking)
(2) Self-regulation and volitional behaviour (including topics such as conscious and unconscious processes of social behavior, self-agency, and impulse control)
(3) Social aggression and fear (including topics such as morality, altruism, psychopathy and social phobia).
(4) Economics and social decision-making behaviour (including topics such as trust, risk, gambling behaviour, and rewards)

The Lecture Course on its own or the full Minor program Social Neuroscience is not only intended for students from Psychology at large, but also open to students from many other programmes inside and outside of the UU Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences who are interested in the relationship between the brain and social behaviour, such as Sociology, Pedagogy, Educational Science, Economics, Political Sciences, Law, Medicine and Biology.

For more information please visit the minor website.