The emerging frontier of interpersonal communication and neuroscience: scanning the social synapse

ABSTRACT

Humans are inherently social, driven to communicate and build relationships with one another. The question of how messages between people create shared understanding lies at the core of interpersonal communication. Relatedly, neuroscience scholars are beginning to investigate how dyads, i.e. two socially interacting brains, produce this shared understanding. Here, we argue that interpersonal communication has much to contribute to this rapidly growing area within neuroscience, while also benefiting from adopting neuroscientific approaches. We illustrate what such research looks like using reactance as a case example. While we are optimistic that neuroscientific research into interpersonal communication processes will grow and yield new insights into communication processes, we will also discuss challenges and potential misunderstandings that researchers may encounter.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpersonal neuroscience
• message-centered approach
• hyperscanning
• EEG
• reactance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Interested readers are referred to the website www.neurosynth.org where one can instantly conduct automated meta-analyses on thousands of neuroimaging studies (e.g. examine which brain regions become active during ‘self-related cognition,’ or ‘face perception’(Yarkoni et al., 2011)).

2 Whether understanding between people depends on individual-level mechanisms (reductionist view) or group-level mechanisms (interactionist view) is a philosophical and ongoing debate in cognitive neuroscience (for review see Gallotti & Frith, 2013a and commentary Di Paolo et al., 2013; Gallotti & Frith, 2013b). From a more reductionist view, understanding must obviously occur within the brain of each individual separately, yet from a more interactionist view, the relevant subprocesses within each brain are contingent upon each other because one person’s message influences the others’ thoughts and emotions, which in turn prompts responses that create interaction-dependent feedback loops.

3 Neuroimaging is inherently correlational, that is it measures neural correlates of mental phenomena, but it does not intervene and alter them. Causal brain stimulation methods do exist, but these are beyond the scope of this article. With these methods, it may become possible to interfere with reactance processes by selectively altering the activity in particular brain regions.