What Neuroscience Can Tell Us about Social Situations

The goal of this chapter is to highlight how neuroimaging techniques can complement behavioral approaches for understanding situations. The chapter describes three situational contexts relevant to applying these techniques to study situational contexts. First, it considers the neuroimaging environment itself as situational context and delineates unique features of this environment that can impact subjective experience. Second, it reviews methodological trends for eliciting situational experiences in a neuroimaging environment, particularly in the domain of interpersonal interactions. Third, it discusses recent neuroimaging evidence suggesting that diverse social situations share common underlying neural responses. The chapter highlights how manipulating an individual’s construal of a situation can provide additional insights into the neurobiology of positive and negative situations. Together, neuroimaging approaches can provide one organizing principle for the vast constellation of situations. The hope is to encourage researchers to apply these approaches to gain novel and complementary insights into situational experience.