A Systems Neuroscience Approach for Understanding Social Behavior

Social behaviors are a fundamental part of a functioning society and social deficits have emerged as one of the major symptoms observed in many psychiatric diseases. We provide evidence that neural circuits underlying behaviors such as observational learning provide the building blocks for general social cognition and thus may play critical roles in the social deficits seen in psychiatric disease. Future work will be aimed at delineating how various circuits underlie social behaviors, how those circuits malfunction in psychiatric disease, and how we can utilize that information to provide better and more effective treatments for patients.