Social Neuroscience

The fledgling Society for Social Neuroscience held its inaugural meeting in November. Two months later, the organisation's first president, John Cacioppo and board member Jean Decety (both are psychologists based at the University of Chicago) published a landmark article on the state of the subdiscipline: 'Challenges and opportunities in social neuroscience' (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: tinyurl.com/36ht92t). 'Social neuroscience is the interdisciplinary academic field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, and how these social structures and processes impact the brain and biology,' the Society says on its website (s4sn.org). 'The mission of the society is to serve as an international, interdisciplinary, distributed gathering place to advance and foster scientific training, research, and applications in the field for the sake of humankind.