✨ Letter from the President ✨
Steve Chang would like to express his sincere gratitude to everyone who contributed to making #S4SN2025 such a great success. This year’s meeting took place in beautiful Lisbon, Portugal, in September.
Thank you for joining us in Lisbon, you all made the conference a truely wonderful event! ♥️
See you next time - more details of next meeting will be announced later. Stayed tuned!
#S4SN2025
I had such an incredible time at @s4sn.bsky.social. I took a lot of pictures of Portugal but none at the conference, so here's a video of an otter at the aquarium.
Thanks so much to the organizers for putting together a great conference, and thanks to all the presenters!
#S4SN2025
Now, after so much science, new impressions, and stimulating discussions, off to the last social event at #S4SN2025! 🥳
After all, 'social neuroscience' includes being social and that can be done at a party 😁💃🕺
In Marco Wittmann's #S4SN2025 talk, we learned that the brain reduces complexity in social situations by tracking the relationships that exist in a social group.
These basic functions are computed in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex. 🧠
In the symposium on a cross-species perspective on the role of the frontal cortex in monitoring one's own actions and those of others, #S4SN2025 featured great minds:
Chunyu Ann Duan told us that mice dynamically adapt their strategies in a foraging task as soon as it becomes competitive.
On the last day of #S4SN2025, there were many more cool presentations!
In the symposium on cortical mechanisms of behavioral coordination and competition, Jarildy Javier showed that mice have different phenotypes in coordinated reward behavior - workers & parasites! 😱
Btw, this week I'm (kinda live) posting for @s4sn.bsky.social as it is their annual conference #S4SN2025 in beautiful Lisbon!
If you're interested in social neuroscience, follow along! ⤵️
Wow that's already day 3 done! Who's ready for the last day of #S4SN2025 social neuroscience fun tomorrow? 🥲
And a few great short/invited talks by cool people at #S4SN2025! ⤵️
Tommy Lee explains how variation in OXTR Levels affects partner preference in voles!
In the #S4SN2025 symposium "Behavioral, neural and computational mechanisms of dynamic social coordination in primates", there were some great talks!
Alexandra Battaglia-Mayer presented work on coordination of joint action in primates 🐒
More cool topics at #S4SN2025!
Daniela Schiller investigates how people encode affiliation with others in relation to themselves! 🗣️👤
New day, new talks at #S4SN2025!
For example, William Li showed how animals act in a naturalistic competitive foraging setting. 🐭🥜
Aaaand invited speaker Michael Yartsev studies natural social behavior in groups of bats. 🦇
Why bats? Bats live their lives almost entirely in collective social settings and they live quite long so they interact a lot with others. Fascinating!
#S4SN2025
In another short talk, Diana Prata talked about oxytocin and human social psychophysiology!
#S4SN2025
Thomas Pomberger presented a cortical circuit for communicative salience!
How does the insula encode social vocal signals in mice? 🐭
#S4SN2025
Thomas Pomberger presented a cortical circuit for communicative salience!
How does the insula encode social vocal signals in mice? 🐭
#S4SN2025
The #S4SN2025 award talk by Caroline Parkinson was on integrating social neuroscience & social networks.
They created a big network from people's social networks in same-study programs/ student dorms.
The results?
1) People can positively predict the position of someone in this social network.
Great keynote at #S4SN2025 by Catherine Dulac on the neurobiology of sickness behavior! 🤒
If an individual is sick they express specific sickness behaviors (e.g. shivering, loss of appetite etc).
If you put a sick mouse and healthy mouse in the same cage, they will avoid each other, ...
Last in the empathy symposium, Grit Hein presents on social transmission of empathy! 👭
Empathy can be learned - if participants observe another person expressing high empathic vs. lower empathic ratings they will adapt their own ratings accordingly.
#S4SN2025
Next is Andreas Olsson talking about prosocial behaviors under threat.
In humans, vicarious threat learning leads to similar brain activity in observers and demonstrators - the more synchronized brain activity, SCR and eye-to-eye coupling, the better the observer learned in the task.
#S4SN2025
Great symposium today with @honglab.bsky.social Andreas Olsson and Grit Hein on empathy across species at @s4sn.bsky.social in Lisbon! #s4sn2025
Next up, @honglab.bsky.social!
Mice show prosocial behaviors and coordinate with each other to achieve mutual rewards. 🐭
Mice also get better at coordinating over time (waiting for the other, nose poking to time their behaviors)! 🐁
#S4SN2025
The fantastic @moeneuro.bsky.social talking about social transfer of pain & analgesia in mice today!
1) Mice express pain-related behaviours they observe in others & this transfer effect is related to Activity in ACC and NAc!
#S4SN2025
“Social behavior is the cause of and solution to all of our problems,” Liz Hammock giving a beautiful talk at the Larry Young Memorial symposium at #s4sn2025 @s4sn.bsky.social
Starting now! #S4SN2025 🤗
