Dealing with others: investigations on automatic and controlled processes in Social Cognitive Neuroscience.

Human beings are social animals. By living in society with other individuals, the number of social stimuli is due to be higher than when living alone. Thus, correctly and efficiently processing, and adapting to, those stimuli means increased fitness to the environment, and, as such, increased survivability and gene propagation. Ultimately, evolutionary success. Social cognitive neuroscience addresses the processes that let individuals interpret their own behavior and others’: how and what individual think about conspecifics. Both processes that aim at making sense of the social environment and those that aim at adapting the behavior to the social environment are aimed at obtaining the best possible fitness to the environment. However, some processes occur automatically under certain conditions, out of the individual awareness, while others are generated and carried on intentionally. In this work, I explore automatic and controlled processes in action perception and emotion regulation, two cognitive functions that aim at making sense of the social environment and adapting the behaviour to it. I heavily draw from the methods of neuroscience by using tools such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, electromyography and electrocardiography that have only recently been introduced in social cognition studies. Finally, I discuss theoretically these results in light of possible implementations in educational videogames as the new medium that may be able to create the optimal learning environment.