ABC seminar

Lauri Nummenmaa talks about how emotions modulate social relationships. The location is back to the usual one in the F-building.

Emotions as social glue

Emotions coordinate human cerebral information processing, peripheral physiological states and behaviour in survival-salient settings but also during social interaction. Here I present an overview of our recent functional and molecular neuroimaging work that addresses the role of emotions in modulating and maintaining social relationships. First I discuss how emotions promote social interaction by increasing behavioural and neural synchrony across communicating dyads as well as in groups of individuals exposed to similar emotional information. Next I describe how endogenous opioid neurotransmission provides the candidate pathway for maintenance of social bonds in humans, and discuss how social touching and laughter can be used for reinforcing interpersonal bonds. Finally, I show how individual differences in opioidergic neurotransmission are associated with adult attachment styles, markedly influencing sociability and psychosocial well being. Altogether these results show that emotions have a critical role in human social behavior, and may provide the key mechanism for bridging minds together at both short and long timescales.