Integrative study of cognitive, social, and emotional processes in clinical neuroscience.

Humans naturally reside within complex settings that are infused with emotional and social dimensions. Survival in early years of life clearly depends upon persons who provide a supportive environment not only for survival and growth but also for social and emotional engagement. The shared attention and emotional exchanges between caregivers and children provide a crucible for human attachments that evolve to influence cognition and behavior. Development occurs mainly within social contexts that typically include family, friends, community, and school. Each of these environments entails relationships with others that are organized by acquired rules of behavior, emotional exchange, and reciprocal interaction that emanate from shared knowledge, understanding, and roles. From the developmental psychology literature, Piaget emphasized that children are actively engaged in constructing knowledge in the form of concepts, rules, relationships, and even self-awareness and intentionality. Theory of mind capacities begin to emerge as early as 18 months of age. In middle childhood, children begin to transition from individualguided rules and values to ones that arise through shared cooperation and mutual respect, permitting involvement in diverse social groupings, competitions, and other forms of interaction. Adaptation is related to successful navigation of these social landscapes, and this requires integrative forms of cognitive, emotional, and social intelligence that inevitably depend upon multiple, coordinated brain systems. The prefrontal cortex appears to be a centerpiece of such maturation, particularly for acquiring the integrated knowledge of self, others, and environments that continues to broaden and deepen throughout development into adulthood. Recent advances in psychology as well as clinical and basic branches of neuroscience have markedly altered many conceptions of emotion and cognition, opening new avenues for multidisciplinary research. This progress has been fueled by the pressing need to understand the pathophysiology of many disabling brain diseases that impair cognition, emotion, and social adaptation and by the novel methods of functional brain imaging that have revitalized the study of typical brain– behavior processes in development and adulthood. It has become increasingly clear from scientific research that cognition encompasses specific abilities to amplify, elaborate, constrain, and regulate emotions that are crucial to social adaptation. Emotion, on the other hand, enlivens, dampens, focuses, and sustains cognitive processes, influencing attention, thinking, memory, and decision making. These contemporary views of affective neuroscience are radically different from the older concept of emotion and cognition as being linked to entirely separate brain systems and have continued to evolve in understanding since the seminal observations of MacLean. Today, it seems natural, even from a scientific perspective, to consider how the human mind interweaves cognition, emotion, and social processes and what neural substrates mediate their integrative acquisition, elaboration, and expression. In fact, this topic has been tackled from an increasing array of scientific approaches and formats that encompass study of healthy individuals and diverse clinical samples across the age spectrum. The catch-terms have included affective neuroscience, social neuroscience, and social cognitive neuroscience, among others. In this vein, the articles enlisted for this special issue share a common focus that bears upon the behavioral and neural relationships of cognition, emotion, and social processes. They emanated from diverse laboratories in the Americas and Europe by neurology, neuropsychology, and neuropsychiatry investigators. The methodologies and research participants are purposefully diverse and meant to advance understanding of specific clinical problems and stimulate novel approaches to these complex issues. In the initial article, Moll and colleagues employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methodology to investigate social–moral emotions in normal adult participants. Social–moral emotions are a class of affective processes such as empathy, admiration, embarrassment, and indignation that are particularly imbued with social meaning. They are conceptualized as an integral part of everyday social interactions and also a key aspect of shared culture (eg, art, religion, politics, and government). fMRI/blood oxygenation level–dependent imaging was undertaken while participants read a series of statements depicting neutral scenes and scenes emotionally charged with disgust (eg, ‘‘A friend told you about a newspaper headline. A man had died after he ate a live rat’’) or moral Received for publication September 30, 2004; accepted November 18, 2004. *Departments of Neurology, Neural and Behavioral Sciences, Radiology and Pediatrics, College of Medicine, Pennsylvania State University, Hershey, Pennsylvania; and †Departments of Neurology and Psychology, University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, Iowa City, Iowa. Reprints: Dr. Paul J. Eslinger, Department of Neurology, H037, Penn State/Hershey Medical Center, PO Box 850, Hershey, PA 17033-0850 (e-mail: peslinger@psu.edu). Copyright 2005 by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins