CHAPTtr , R ? Social Cognitive Neuroscience Historical Development , Core Principles , and Future Promise

Thc supermarket checkout line provides interesting lesr. ,ns about the human psyche. Beside the social norms '-::-rr clictate that we stand in line and politely pay our bill, xrcl before we encounter the disaffected teenage lccker, there is the point-of-purchase magazine gambit. rr.rtegically placed above the checkout conveyor belt are :rrrss of magazines heralding the latest pop-culture hapatnings. Typically, two types of cover stories clamor for ettention: those about the relationship hijinks of highprofile people and those about new businesses and techrology that could "change the way we live and work. " \rnce its emergence at the beginning of the 21st century, *rrial cognitive neuroscience (SCN) has been purported :o be both. At turns, SCN has been billed either as a hot :rerr power coupling of social psychology and cognitive retrroscience or as a fast-growing research startup lookrns for investment capital. The fact that we use relationship metaphors to deicribe SCN may not be that surprising. Indeed, the supermarket checkout line is a regular reminder that humans ere fundamentally social beings (Fiske, 1991; Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998). Magazines capitalize ,rn the facts that we care a great deal about our personal and our professional relationships and that stories and rrretaphors help us understand them (Lakoff, 1987, 1993). The beauty of metaphors is that when correctly applied they can help us intuitively grasp what something means. The danger of metaphors is that when incorrectly applied they can lead us to overlook important differences between the objects of comparison. In this regard, using different relationship metaphors to describe SCN invites different types of questions about its nature. On one hand, a personal metaphor might lead to questions about how parent disciplines begat SCN, what they were thinking when they did so, and how SCN will develop and mature. On the other hand, a professional metaphor might lead to questions about SCN's business plan, principles for effective production, and growth potential. The goal of this chapter is to address the nature of SCN. Toward that end, it uses the personal and professional relationship metaphors to organize discussion of questions about its practice, its principles, and its promise. The first section of the chapter takes the personal metaphor as a starting point for describing SCN's histori cal roots and developmental progression. The second section uses the professional metaphor to springboard consideration of core principles that govern its practice. The third and final section highlights promising directions for future work. The goal of this chapter is not to describe basic psychological and neural principles that underlie a specific type of socioemotional ability. Rather, the goal is to describe the development and nature of basic principles that underlie SCN as an approach that can be applied to investigating any number of topics (Blakemore & Frith, 2004; Blakemore, Winsron, & Frith, 2004; Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001). For principles related to specific types of ability, the reader is referred to other chapters in this volume, and to SCN work on social cognition and theory