The Neural Basis of Mentalizing

Humans have a unique ability to understand the beliefs, emotions, and intentions of others—a capacity often referred to as mentalizing. Much research in psychology and neuroscience has focused on delineating the mechanisms of mentalizing, and examining the role of mentalizing processes in other domains of cognitive and affective functioning. The purpose of the book is to provide a comprehensive overview of the current research on the mechanisms of mentalizing at the neural, algorithmic, and computational levels of analysis. The book includes contributions from prominent researchers in the field of social-cognitive and affective neuroscience, as well as from related disciplines (e.g., cognitive, social, developmental and clinical psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, primatology). The contributors review their latest research in order to compile an authoritative source of knowledge on the psychological and brain bases of the unique human capacity to think about the mental states of others. The intended audience is researchers and students in the fields of social-cognitive and affective neuroscience and related disciplines such as neuroeconomics, cognitive neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, social cognition, social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and affective science. Secondary audiences include researchers in decision science (economics, judgment and decision-making), philosophy of mind, and psychiatry.

Table of Contents:
1. A Guide to The Neural Bases of Mentalizing.- 2. Mapping mentalising in the brain.- 3. Early Theory of Mind development - Are infants inherently altercentric?.- 4. Towards the Integration of Social Cognition and Social Motivation in Autism Spectrum Disorder.- 5. Self-Other Distinction.- 6. The evolution of mentalizing in humans and other primates.- 7. Mentalizing in Non-Human Primates.- 8. Empathic accuracy: Empirical overview and clinical applications.- 9. Empathic accuracy: Lessons from the perception of contextualized real-life emotional expressions.- 10. Flexible social cognition: A context-dependent failure to mentalize.- 11. Linking models of theory of mind and measures of human brain activity.- 12. Simulation, Predictive Coding, and the Shared World.- 13. Mental Files and Teleology.- 14. The organization of social knowledge is tuned for prediction.- 15. Computational models of mentalizing.- 16. FromNeurons to Knowing: Implications of Theoretical Approaches for Conceptualizing and Studying the Neural Bases of Social Understanding.- 17. The Tree of Social Cognition: Hierarchically Organized Capacities of Mentalizing.- 18. The cognitive basis of mindreading.- 19. The Neural Basis and Representation of Social Attributions.- 20. The Conceptual Content of Mental Activity.- 21. The role(s) of language in Theory of Mind.- 22. Constructive Episodic Simulation: Cognitive and Neural Processes.- 23. Proactive by Default.- 24. Computational approaches to mentalizing during observational learning and strategic social interactions.- 25. Mentalizing in value-based social decision-making: shaping expectations and social norms.- 26. Mentalizing in Value Based Vicarious Learning  .- 27. An examination of accurate versus “biased” mentalizing in moral and economic decision-making.- 28. The role of morality in social cognition.- 29.An interbrain approach for understanding empathy: the contribution of empathy to interpersonal emotion regulation .- 30. The Role of Mentalizing in Communication Behaviors.- 31. Tangled Representations of Self and Others in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex.- 32. Why Don’t You Like Me? The Role of the Mentalizing Network in Social Rejection.- 33. Putting the “me” in “mentalizing”: Multiple constructs describing self versus other during mentalizing and implications for social anxiety disorder.- 34. The self–other distinction in psychopathology: Recent developments from a mentalizing perspective.