Levels of “SOCIAL”

The social brain hypothesis is focused on the explanation of the great size and complexity of the human brain as a result of social interactions, ranging from deceit to cooperation to ways of finding food and ensuring posterity (Allman 1999; Barrett & Henzi 2005; Dunbar 1998; Dunbar & Schultz 2007a,b). There are several concepts that are closely related to the concept of social brain and all of them together help to clarify the social processes from various aspects and standpoints, including the role of emotions.

One of them is that of “social behavior” and especially its sub-variant – “prosocial behavior”. According to Kennedy and Adolphs “social behavior” is “the anchor for all these different levels of explanation” and comprises the readily observable interactions between an individual and other people. (Kennedy, Adolphs, 2012, 559–572). Respectively, prosocial behavior is defined as “voluntary behavior intended to benefit others” and entails a broad multidimensional domain of behaviors, such as altruistic helping, sharing, and cooperation (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Spinrad, 2006, 646; Padilla-Walker & Carlo, 2014, 3–16). It includes interpersonal helping behavior, but also cooperation that benefits one’s group (Batson & Powell, 2003, 463–484; Penner, Dovidio, Piliavin, & Schroeder, 2005, 356–392). (Van Hoorn, 2016, 90-100.)

“Social cognition” – According to Kennedy and Adolphs, it refers to the various psychological processes (both conscious and non-conscious) that underlie social behavior. Kennedy and Adolphs use the term ‘social cognition’ relatively broadly here, including any cognitive processing (e.g., perception, reasoning, memory, attention, motivation, and decision-making) that underlies a social ability or social behavior. The processing of social stimuli and the generation of social behavior typically engage some processing that are relatively specialized for the social domain (recognizing faces, thinking about what another person is thinking, hearing somebody call one’s name) and other processes that also participate, but are more general in function. (Kennedy, Adolphs, 2012, 559–572).

Another related concept is that of “social functioning”. It is broader than social behavior as it refers to the long-term ability of an individual to interact with others, determined by the environment and particular situation within a community.

“Social brain” – it historically refers to those brain structures that subserve social processes (Brothers, 1990, 27–51): regions in the temporal lobe for processing faces (Tsao 2008; 411–438; Kanwisher, et al, 1997, 4302–4311; Kanwisher, Yovel, 2006, 2109–2128.), the temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex for representing other people’s beliefs (Scholz et al, 2009, 4:e4869; Saxe, Powell, 2006, 692–699; Gallager, Frith, 2003, 77–83), and some newly added regions encompass structures related to social perception, social attribution, and other aspects of social cognition (Adolphs, 2009, 693–716). In principle, the relationship between the different levels of ‘social’ is straightforward: the social brain implements social cognition, which in turn causes social behavior, which in turn constitutes social functioning when integrated over time and context (Kennedy, Adolphs, 2012, 559–572).

Still another concept is that of “social evaluation” – it defines a mental process that supports the preference toward prosocial partners (positivity bias) against the avoidance of antisocial individuals (negativity bias) in a cooperative context.

Social evaluation could also be characterized as “a mental process during which an individual (1) assigns different values (positive, negative) to particular behavioral patterns (e.g., helping, hindering) that are performed in a social interaction (e.g., problem solving), (2) associates these behaviors with specific individuals (partnership values) and (3) shows different behaviors (e.g., avoidance or preference) toward others based on the overall value which has been associated with them. Social evaluation is composed of two building blocks. Negativity bias refers to an aversion of negative (social) stimuli that can manifest in the avoidance of the antisocial partner (Hamlin et al, 2010; Anderson et al, 2013a;) (Abdai, Miklosi, 2016).