Computational methods in social neuroscience: recent advances, new tools and future directions

Recent years have seen a surge of exciting developments in the computational tools available to social neuroscientists. This paper highlights and synthesizes recent advances that have been enabled by the application of such tools, as well as methodological innovations likely to be of interest and utility to social neuroscientists, but that have been concentrated in other sub-fields. Papers in this special issue are emphasized—many of which contain instructive materials (e.g. tutorials and code) for researchers new to the highlighted methods. These include approaches for modeling social decisions, characterizing multivariate neural response patterns at varying spatial scales, using decoded neurofeedback to draw causal links between specific neural response patterns and psychological and behavioral phenomena, examining time-varying patterns of connectivity between brain regions, and characterizing the social networks in which social thought and behavior unfold in everyday life. By combining computational methods for characterizing participants’ rich social environments—at the levels of stimuli, paradigms and the webs of social relationships that surround people—with those for capturing the psychological processes that undergird social behavior and the wealth of information contained in neuroimaging datasets, social neuroscientists can gain new insights into how people create, understand and navigate their complex social worlds.