38 Domains of social cognitive neuroscience: strengths and limits Social cognitive neuroscience has emphasized that apprehending and coping with socially relevant material #figure 2 randurls[1|1|,|CHEM1|]# heavily relies on general cognitive abilities, such as perception, attention, memory, and language. These abilities and the brain systems related to them are critically engaged in processing discriminating Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical features

(from physical traits to abstract principles) that are important for guiding choice preference, group belonging/formation, and other species-specific activities, and more generally for optimizing social interactions, with con-specifics (eg, friends, family, coworkers) or institutions. The notion of “social interactions” is often intended as the interplay

between cooperation and competition among individuals and groups (family, kinship, hierarchical dominance) of the same species. Under such a view, an operating model for the self is left implicit in the background and is scientific assay similar in its assumptions to Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the classical economic agent.39 Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical This implicit operating model of the self is also framed in reference to Darwinian evolution and the struggle for life. The current success of the field of neuroeconomics stems apparently from such a view.40-42 In the field of social cognitive neuroscience, a substantial crosstalk exists between animal and human research. Evolutionary hypotheses and a comparative perspective have become integral to the normal discourse on social cognition and to the endeavor of uncovering treatments for psychiatry, based on the paradigm of animal models. The field seems to be generally highly receptive Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to scientific work telling stories of overlap between findings from animal Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical models and human studies (eg, amygdala and fear, or striatum and reward43,44). In spite of the large and still-developing research effort, including functional neuroimaging, few hypotheses have emerged that are autochthonous to

human research and reach a plausible level of psychological integration (eg, see literature on Default Mode Network45,46). The progression of the application to humans of hypotheses related to animal research (an ambitious research program that has been pursued over a few decades that has seen some exceptional developments (eg, refs GSK-3 47,48) while seeking the precision necessary to a scientific field has so far led to the development of a social neuroscience that has not adequately addressed some critical issues (for relative exceptions see refs 49-51). When borrowing from animal studies to develop hypotheses on humans that are directly relevant to psychiatry, an example of a critical question is to what extent animal emotions are germane to the homologous emotions in humans (beyond the use of common terminology and reference to a common evolutionary background).