Next, we briefly take stock of the major current themes, before extrapolating into the future. Social neuroscience has made major contributions in many respects. One methodological accomplishment has been to help develop and refine fMRI methods, an advance linked in part to prior critiques we note below. A topical contribution has been the study of individual differences in social behavior. This topic is now often related to genotypic differences

(Green et al., 2008) and even to structural brain differences (Kanai and Rees, 2011), with investigation of the effects of culture a hot topic (Rule et al., 2013). There have been major extensions also to understanding psychiatric illness (Cacioppo et al., 2007), as well as see more the effects of stress and immune function on mood in healthy people

(Eisenberger and Cole, 2012). And there has been a recent flurry of attention to real social interactions (as opposed to mere simulations of them), an aspect that has almost spawned its own subdiscipline and is of interest to cognitive scientists more broadly (Schilbach et al., 2013). A good example of one of the earliest success stories in social neuroscience began in the late 1980s and INCB024360 mouse early 1990s with the discovery of the roles of the neuropeptides oxytocin (OT) and arginine vasopressin (AVP) in social affiliative behaviors. Not only did this work result in a string of elegant papers dissecting the neural circuits and genetic polymorphisms governing Bumetanide affiliative behavior in an animal model (voles; Insel and Young, 2001), but it was also extended to behavioral and neuroimaging studies in humans, including extensions to treatments of

psychiatric disorders (Baumgartner et al., 2008, Insel and Young, 2001, Kosfeld et al., 2005 and McCall and Singer, 2012). Previously known to play a role in bodily processes related to mammalian child-rearing (OT) and kidney function (AVP), it is now well established that both OT and AVP influence a broad range of social behaviors. In nonhuman mammals, OT has been shown to underlie social bonding behaviors, AVP has been linked to long-term pair bonding and male aggression, and the brain regions in which receptors for these peptides are found have been drawn into a circuit for processing social signals that mediate these behaviors. More than that, genetic polymorphisms in the receptor genes have been linked to species differences in social behavior, providing a story that cuts powerfully across widely different levels of analysis (Insel and Fernald, 2004 and Insel and Young, 2001). In the past decade, researchers have begun to explore the influence of OT (which can be delivered intranasally) and, to a lesser extent, AVP on human social behavior: OT can increase social trust (Kosfeld et al.