The emergence of social cognitive neuroscience

Social cognitive neuroscience is an emerging interdisciplinary field of res earch that seeks to understand phenomena in terms of interactions between 3 levels of analysis: the social level, which is concerned with the motivati onal and social factors that influence behavior and experience; the cogniti ve level, which is concerned with the information-processing mechanisms tha t give rise to social-level phenomena; and the neural level, which is conce rned with the brain mechanisms that instantiate cognitive-level processes. The social cognitive neuroscience approach entails conducting studies and c onstructing theories that make reference to all 3 levels and contrasts with traditional social psychological and cognitive neuroscientific research th at primarily makes reference to 2 levels. The authors present an introducti on to and analysis of the field by reviewing current research and providing guidelines and suggested directions for future work.