Innovators in
Cognitive Neuroscience

Elisa Baek

UCLA

April 21, 2021, 12:00 PM ET

Charitable cause:
Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund

Title:
Shared understanding promotes social connection: neural and behavioral evidence

Abstract:
Forging and maintaining meaningful social connections is critical to mental and physical well-being. How do our brains support our efforts to be successful in initiating and maintaining social ties? In this talk, I highlight some of my work that uses neuroimaging and social network analysis to study various facets of social connection. First, I present neural and behavioral evidence that underscores the role of information sharing as a fundamentally social act, one that we engage in to feel connected with others. Next, I show results from recent work that highlights neural responses that distinguish individuals who are well-connected from those who are less well-connected in a social network, as well as factors that contribute to subjective feelings of social disconnection. Taken together, these findings suggest that a shared sense of understanding of the world around us, as reflected in convergent neural processing across brains, helps us feel close to one another.

American Sign Language (ASL) and
closed captioning will be provided.