Course Syllabus
The Loving Brain: The Neuroscience of Relationships |
| Semester & Location: |
Fall 2024 - DIS Stockholm |
| Type & Credits: |
Core Course - 3 credits |
| Study Tours: |
Malmö Bosnia-Croatia |
| Major Disciplines: |
Psychology, Neuroscience |
| Prerequisite(s): |
One course in neuroscience, physiological psychology, biological psychology, or cognitive psychology at university level. |
| Faculty Members: |
Richard Lewis, PhD Visiting Faculty in Fall 2024 semester (current students please use the Canvas Inbox) |
| Program Contact: |
Department email address psy.cns@dis.dk |
| Time & Place: |
Time: Mondays and Thursdays 8.30-9.50 Classroom: 1-C505 |
Course Description
What is the nature of love? In this course we will explore the neuroscientific research on social relationships. We will investigate a wide range of relationships, including, but not limited to, parent-sibling relationships, friendships, romantic relationships, as well as social ostracism and rejection. We will examine relationships with an evolutionary lens as we consider primate brain evolution as a function of the adaptive value of social connections. A fundamental question will be whether neuroscientific research enhances our understanding of social relationships. Furthermore, we will investigate how variation in the cultural emphasis on independence and interdependence relates to cultural differences in brain activity and social relationships. A principal framework for our inquiry will be to understand the implications this research has for health and wellbeing.
Learning Objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Appreciate the usefulness of the social brain framework for understanding social relationships
- Associate brain activity with different kinds of social relationships
- Apply the neuroscience of relationships to social issues
Faculty
Richard Lewis, PhD. Richard is currently Professor of Neuroscience and Psychological Science at Pomona College. He teaches courses in introductory neuroscience and psychological science, social neuroscience and cultural neuroscience. His current research examines sociocultural influences on human brain activity. For example, his research team uses electrophysiology and functional near infrared spectroscopy to investigate how culture influences neural processing of the physical and social environment. Additional research interests include the influence of early adversity on prefrontal activation during decision making and the relationship between self-construal, prefrontal activity during emotion regulation and social anxiety. His research has been funded by NIMH, NIH, and NSF, and he was awarded the Pomona College Distinguished Professorship Award for Excellence in Teaching, twice. With DIS in Fall 2024.
Readings
Required readings will be listed for each individual class, so please check the calendar to identify what you should read before class. Note that the following list of journal articles and book chapters is subject to change.
Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2004). The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love. Neuroimage, 21(3), 1155-1166.
Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2000). The neural basis of romantic love. Neuroreport, 11(17), 3829-3834.
Calabrò, R. S., et al. (2019). Neuroanatomy and function of human sexual behavior: A neglected or unknown issue?. Brain and behavior, 9(12), e01389.
de Boer, A., Van Buel, E. M., & Ter Horst, G. J. (2012). Love is more than just a kiss: A neurobiological perspective on love and affection. Neuroscience, 201, 114-124.
Decety, J., Chen, C., Harenski, C., & Kiehl, K. A. (2013). An fMRI study of affective perspective taking in individuals with psychopathy: imagining another in pain does not evoke empathy. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 7, 489.
Dunbar, R. I. (2009). The social brain hypothesis and its implications for social evolution. Annals of human biology, 36(5), 562-572.
Eckstein, M., Stößel, G., Gerchen, M. F., Bilek, E., Kirsch, P., & Ditzen, B. (2023). Neural responses to instructed positive couple interaction: an fMRI study on compliment sharing. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 18(1), 1-9.
Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). The pain of social disconnection: examining the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain. Nature reviews neuroscience, 13(6), 421-434.
Fitzduff, M. (2021). Our brains at war: The neuroscience of conflict and peacebuilding. Oxford University Press.
Fong, M. C., Goto, S. G., Moore, C., Zhao, T., Schudson, Z., & Lewis, R. S. (2014). Switching between Mii and Wii: The effects of cultural priming on the social affective N400. Culture and Brain, 2, 52-71.
Gilam, G., & Hendler, T. (2016). With love, from me to you: embedding social interactions in affective neuroscience. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 68, 590-601.
Goto et al. (2021), Culture and Self-Construal. In Chiao, J. Y., Mano, Y., Li, Z., Bebko, G. M., Blizinsky, K. D., & Turner, R. (2021). Cultural neuroscience. Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience and Global Mental Health.
Han, S. (2017). Cultural diversity: From behavior to mind and brain. In Han, S. (2017). The sociocultural brain: A cultural neuroscience approach to human nature. Oxford University Press.
Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological science, 17(10), 847-853.
Holt-Lunstad, J. (2021). The major health implications of social connection. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(3), 251-259.
Kingsbury, L., & Hong, W. (2020). A multi-brain framework for social interaction. Trends in neurosciences, 43(9), 651-666.
Kross, E., Berman, M. G., Mischel, W., Smith, E. E., & Wager, T. D. (2011). Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(15), 6270-6275.
Lövestad, S., Vaez, M., Löve, J., Hensing, G., & Krantz, G. (2021). Intimate partner violence, associations with perceived need for help and health care utilization: a population-based sample of women in Sweden. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 49(3), 268-276.
Lyubomirsky, S. (2022). Toward a new science of psychedelic social psychology: The effects of MDMA (ecstasy) on social connection. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(5), 1234-1257.
Mitchell, J.P. (2009). Watching minds interact. In Max Brockman (Eds.), What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science (pp. 78-88). New York: Vintage Books.
Pan, Y., Cheng, X., Zhang, Z., Li, X., & Hu, Y. (2017). Cooperation in lovers: an fNIRS‐based hyperscanning study. Human brain mapping, 38(2), 831-841.
Redcay, E., & Schilbach, L. (2019). Using second-person neuroscience to elucidate the mechanisms of social interaction. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 20(8), 495-505.
Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Metaphors we kill by. R.M. Sapolsky’s In Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin.
Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). War and peace. R.M. Sapolsky’s In Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin.
Stern, J. A., & Grossmann, T. (2024). The neuroscience of social relationships in early development. In M. A. Bell (Ed.), Child development at the intersection of emotion and cognition (2nd ed., pp. 11–30). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000406-002
Šutić, L., Jelić, M., & Krnić, A. (2022). Is Dating Dead? Modern Dating Among Emerging Adults in Croatia. Revija za Sociologiju, 52(3), 359-386.
Telzer, E. H., Kwon, S.-J., & Jorgensen, N. A. (2023). Neurobiological development in adolescence and early adulthood: Implications for positive youth adjustment. In L. J. Crockett, G. Carlo, & J. E. Schulenberg (Eds.), APA handbook of adolescent and young adult development (pp. 629–643). American Psychological Association.
Van Dongen, J. D. (2020). The empathic brain of psychopaths: From social science to neuroscience in empathy. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 695.
Field Studies
Field studies serve to complement your course work by placing you in the professional field to extend and rethink what we read about, discuss in class, and encounter in practicum. Please be ready for each field study by completing all readings and preparing questions in advance.
For our core course week, starting Sep 9, we will spend Monday and Tuesday in Stockholm and explore sex, romance, and sexual relationships. We will visit the Viking Museum to see if we can better understand women's relationships. Wed-Fri we will spend in Malmö and Copenhagen. We will look at Malmö from the perspective of migration and consider how that influences Swedish relationships. In addition, we will talk with researchers from the Centre for Sexology and Sexuality Studies about their research on polyamory and how young people are engaging with online sexual encounters. Of course, we can't pass up an opportunity to visit the Disgusting Food Museum. Lastly, we will visit Copenhagen and tour Freetown Christiania, the intentional community that claims a degree of independence from Denmark.
For our long study tour, we will be visiting Bosnia and Croatia. There we will explore the intricate dynamics that shape relationships, the influence of socio-cultural factors on communities, and the enduring effects that politics, cultural instability, religion, and war have on relationships. How do all of these dynamics come together to influence a person’s home? Set against the backdrop of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, two nations with rich, complicated histories and shared experiences, this tour delves deep into the profound interplay between the personal and communal connections we share.
Guest Lecturers
At various points in the course, guest lecturers will be invited to provide their experience and expertise on select topics being covered in class.
Approach to Teaching
College offers a unique opportunity to develop our brains for the future. My approach to teaching is based on neuroscientific principles for maximizing healthy brains. When we leave our homes and community to go to college, we are challenged with new ideas and perspectives. This is an opportunity to modify our brains by forming new connections and making connections more efficient. The more we struggle with new learning, the greater the modification in our brains. But these changes in our brains will better prepare us for future challenges and minimize the decline as we age.
Leaving our familiar communities, responsible for our early brain development, and interacting with people from different backgrounds, who come with their own assumptions and perspectives, is also quite challenging. These challenges, in particular, have a tremendous influence on our brain development, especially as we begin to see the world through their eyes. Perhaps this is the greatest impact of college, especially as we try to tackle global issues.
Early adulthood is the last great developmental period of our brain before our elderly decline. If we maximize our brain development during college, we will prepare our brains to lead a productive and meaningful life.
Being well and doing well:
-
- Make academics a priority in college, and identify the hours outside of class you will work on each course.
- Prepare for class: Read assigned reading ahead of time.
- Go to class and engage with the material and others
- Form study groups to help structure learning and motivate each other.
- Test each other. Teaching someone else will facilitate deep learning of the material.
- Practicing retrieval is critical for learning. Generate questions according to Blooms taxonomy and be aware of the level of questions you are prepared to answer: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, Creating.
- Interleave(look it up) and space your learning. Alternating your study with different topics and spreading your learning over time is much more effective than massed, single topic study. If you feel like you forget everything after the semester is over, you are probably engaging in massed learning.
- Get plenty of sleep. Slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep are related to learning and memory consolidation. So, during a period of massive learning, you want to get plenty of sleep to let your brain process your new learning. Sleep also helps to regulate your emotions.
- Don’t drink and don’t do drugs—they reduce REM sleep and do other bad things to your brain.
- Get plenty of exercise. Physical activity is related to the generation of new neurons in the hippocampus, one of the main brain structures involved in memory.
- Meditation is associated with many health benefits, including increased connectivity between frontal cortex (e.g. involved in decision making) and limbic areas (e.g. involved in processing emotions), which will enable you to better regulate your emotions.
- Help each other—social support helps to reduce stress and helps to regulate our emotions. Doing nice things for others increases our happiness more than doing nice things for ourselves.
- Moderate, short-term stress is actually beneficial for increased attention and concentration. However, chronic, severe stress will interfere with neurogenesis in the hippocampus (and will start to break down your body and brain). Regulate your stress levels—see 7, 8, & 9.
- Be careful of the tendency to eat unhealthily when stressed—we seek out salt and fat and sugar when stressed to comfort us.
- Focus on the things you can control and let everything else go. For example, you can control your preparation for an exam or how much effort you put into a paper but you can’t control your grade.
- Stay healthy: Practice good hygiene. Wash hands, carry sanitizer, mask when in crowded spaces or not feeling well, etc.
- Develop your prefrontal cortex and working memory, cognitive control, planning, emotion regulation, inhibition, conflict monitoring, valuation (and gain control over your limbic system).
- -20. Generate your own principles.
Expectations of the Students
As this is a predominantly discussion-based course, the success of the course depends on your serious commitment to truly engage with the material. To that end, I expect you to spend at least 6 hours every week outside of class preparing for this seminar. You must come to class prepared, having closely read and evaluated the reading assignments, and your class discussions should reflect this careful reading. While taking notes on the reading assignments, try to identify which portions of the assignments were particularly notable/important and why they caught your attention. Include summaries in your own words, write questions to yourself, agree/disagree with the content, and generally try to delve yourself deeply into a thoughtful evaluation of the reading assignments.
You are expected to behave professionally and participate actively during class and field studies. This includes all of the following:
- Attend all class meetings, field studies, and related activities.
- Be punctual and stay for the entire experience.
- Contribute to shared learning: ask relevant questions, offer critical reflections, and respond respectfully to others’ comments.
- Put your phone away and turn off notifications on any other electronic devices.
Evaluation
To be eligible for a passing grade in this class you must complete all of the assigned work.
You will be evaluated based on your performance on the course assignments as indicated below.
Class Participation: Students are expected to read the assigned material before class and contribute to class discussions. Grading of class participation will be broken up into 3 components: Attendance, Attentiveness, and Contributions. During our field studies we will have additional assignments and expectations. Please read "Rules of Engagement" for expectations of class discussions:
Rules of Engagement
Learning how to participate in discussions is a skill, and is just as important as leading discussions.
Prepare, prepare, prepare (read assigned readings at least twice—once days in advance and once the night before)
Actively engage with the reading (don’t read passively). Outline key points. Think of questions you might want to raise and points you might like to make.
Listen to others—what are they trying to say? Are there ways that you can facilitate their ideas? Can they be made clearer? refined? How to they relate to other points made in other readings and discussions?
It is just as important to facilitate others’ ideas as your own. Take turns. Give equal weight to your idea as well as and others’ ideas.
Sometimes it is more important to contribute an idea to facilitate the discussion and other times you can facilitate by not saying anything.
Be present and be attentive and be reaffirming, but also be respectfully critical.
Discussion Forum: Before most classes, you will be expected to contribute to the Canvas Discussion with your insights and questions regarding the reading before class. The posts will be graded in terms of whether or not they have been completed. The main purpose of the discussions is twofold: 1) to begin thinking about the reading assignment; and 2) to share some of those thoughts with others in order to prepare for class.
Class Presentations: Each student will conduct two formal presentations of a research article. The presentations will last about 15 minutes. A rubric for the organization and grading of the presentations is provided on Canvas Rubrics.
Observational Research Project: The course will culminate in an observational research project that you will design, conduct, and present in oral and written forms. More details regarding the project is contained in the Canvas Modules section.
Additional details will be provided in class.
Grading
| Assignment |
Percent |
| Class participation and engagement (including study tour assignments) |
25% |
|
Discussion forum |
25% |
|
Class Presentations |
25% |
|
Final Observational Research Project (see module on project) |
25% |
Course Policies
Attendance: You are expected to attend all DIS classes when scheduled. If you miss a class for any reason, please contact the faculty no later than the day of the missed class. If you miss multiple classes the Director of Teaching and Learning, and the Director of Student Affairs will be notified, and they will follow-up with you to make sure that all is well. Absences will jeopardize your grade and your standing at DIS. Allowances will be made in cases of illness or religious holidays, but in the case of multiple absences you will need to provide a doctor’s note.
Academic Honesty, Plagiarism, and Violating the Rules of an Assignment: DIS expects that students abide by the highest standards of intellectual honesty in all academic work. DIS assumes that all students do their own work and credit all work or thought taken from others. Academic dishonesty will result in a final course grade of “F” and can result in dismissal. The students’ home universities will be notified. DIS reserves the right to request that written student assignments be turned in electronic form for submission to plagiarism detection software. See the Academic Handbook for more information or ask your instructor if you have questions.
Policy on Late Papers: Late essays will be accepted for up to 3 days after the deadline, but for each day late, excluding the weekends, a 5% penalty will be applied.
Extensions: You may request an extension for an assignment, but you must ask more than 1 day before the assignment is due. Extension requests on the due date, without an excusable reason, will not be considered.
Policy for Students Who Arrive Late to Class: Please come to classes on time as it is disturbing for the lecturer and other students. Repeated lateness will result in a referral to the head of the Teaching and Learning department.
Use of Laptops or Phones in Class: Computers and iPhones are allowed in class PURELY for academic purposes (e.g. note taking, literature searching, data handling purposes). In case of other private uses such as Facebook, emails or internet surfing, it will have a very negative impact on your participation grade. The use of cell phones during class is strictly forbidden.
Academic Accommodations
Your learning experience in this class is important to me. If you have approved academic accommodations with DIS, please make sure I receive your DIS accommodations letter within two weeks from the start of classes. If you can think of other ways I can support your learning, please don't hesitate to talk to me. If you have any further questions about your academic accommodations, contact Academic Support acadsupport@disstockholm.se
Academic Regulations
Please make sure to read the Academic Regulations on the DIS website. There you will find regulations on:
DIS - Study Abroad in Scandinavia - www.DISabroad.org
Course Summary:
| Date | Details | Due |
|---|---|---|