The Loving Brain: The Neuroscience of Relationships

 

Semester & Location:	Fall 2025 - DIS Stockholm
Type & Credits:	Core Course - 3 credits
Study Tours:	Malmö Bosnia and Herzegovina
Major Disciplines:	Psychology, Neuroscience
Prerequisite(s):	One course in neuroscience, physiological psychology, biological psychology, or cognitive psychology at university level.
Faculty Members:	Morgan Frost-Karlsson (current students please use the Canvas Inbox)
Program Contact:	Department email address psy.cns@dis.dk
Time & Place:	Time: Mondays and Thursdays 14.50 - 16.10 Classroom: C502

 

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.  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.  

The course will be broken into three overarching themes, followed by a period for completing an individual research project. 

Unit 1: The Loving Brain: how we measure it, how it develops, and how it processes social information

Unit 2: The Loathing Brain: empathy, cultural contexts, and 'us' vs 'them'

Unit 3: The Unsocial Brain: isolation and pathology

Unit 4: Individual Research

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

Morgan Frost-Karlsson. Morgan is a fourth year PhD student at the Center for Social and Affective Neuroscience at Linköping University. Her primary research interests are in social development and the development of the 'self', how they are affected by early caregiver interactions, and how they are disturbed in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. She has a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from Boston University with a focus on developmental neurobiology, and a master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Skövde in Sweden, in which her masters thesis with the Gillberg Centre in Gothenburg focused on visual social perception in adolescents with autism. Her current research explores how affective touch influences the distinction between 'self' and 'others' and how this may look different in disorders with an altered sense of ‘self’, using clinical populations with anorexia, autism, and ADHD. With DIS since 2025.

Readings

Required readings will be listed for each individual class, so please check the calendar to identify what you should read before class.

Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. (1994). Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala. Nature, 372(6507), 669-672.

Anderson, E., Siegel, E. H., Bliss-Moreau, E., & Barrett, L. F. (2011). The visual impact of gossip. Science, 332(6036), 1446-1448.

Bartal, I. B. A., Decety, J., & Mason, P. (2011). Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats. Science, 334(6061), 1427-1430.

Boesveldt, S., & Parma, V. (2021). The importance of the olfactory system in human well-being, through nutrition and social behavior. Cell and tissue research, 383(1), 559-567.

Bohlin, G., Hagekull, B., & Rydell, A. M. (2000). Attachment and social functioning: A longitudinal study from infancy to middle childhood. Social development, 9(1), 24-39.

Capozzi, F., & Kingstone, A. (2024). The effects of visual attention on social behavior. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 18(1), e12910.

Castiello, U., Becchio, C., Zoia, S., Nelini, C., Sartori, L., Blason, L., ... & Gallese, V. (2010). Wired to be social: the ontogeny of human interaction. PloS one, 5(10), e13199.

Čehajić-Clancy, S., & Halperin, E. (2024). Advancing research and practice of psychological intergroup interventions. Nature Reviews Psychology, 3(9), 574-588.

Chapman, H. A., & Anderson, A. K. (2012). Understanding disgust. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1251(1), 62-76. 

Cheng, Y., Chen, C., Lin, C. P., Chou, K. H., & Decety, J. (2010). Love hurts: an fMRI study. Neuroimage, 51(2), 923-929.

Croy, I. (2021). The science of social and affective touch. neuroscience, 464, 1-2.

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' error and the future of human life. Scientific American, 271(4), 144-144.

De Araujo, I. E., Rolls, E. T., Kringelbach, M. L., McGlone, F., & Phillips, N. (2003). Taste‐olfactory convergence, and the representation of the pleasantness of flavour, in the human brain. European Journal of Neuroscience, 18(7), 2059-2068.

Eskine, K. J., Kacinik, N. A., & Prinz, J. J. (2011). A bad taste in the mouth: Gustatory disgust influences moral judgment. Psychological science, 22(3), 295-299.

Evers, K. (2014). Can we be epigenetically proactive?. In Open Mind. Open MIND. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.

Evers, K., & Changeux, J. P. (2016). Proactive epigenesis and ethical innovation: A neuronal hypothesis for the genesis of ethical rules. EMBO reports, 17(10), 1361-1364.

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(1), 52-71.

Frith, C. D. (2007). The social brain?. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1480), 671-678.

Gazzola, V., Aziz-Zadeh, L., & Keysers, C. (2006). Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans. Current biology, 16(18), 1824-1829.

Goldbard, A. (2015). Making beauty, making meaning, making community. In Arts and Community Change (pp. 11-27). Routledge.

Goto, S. G., Lewis, R. S., & Grayzel-Ward, S. (2021). Culture and self-construal. The Oxford handbook of cultural neuroscience and global mental health, 288-308.

Han, S. (2017). The sociocultural brain: A cultural neuroscience approach to human nature. Oxford University Press.

Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2007). The cortical organization of speech processing. Nature reviews neuroscience, 8(5), 393-402.

Hunter, M. D., Eickhoff, S. B., Pheasant, R. J., Douglas, M. J., Watts, G. R., Farrow, T. F., ... & Woodruff, P. W. (2010). The state of tranquility: Subjective perception is shaped by contextual modulation of auditory connectivity. Neuroimage, 53(2), 611-618.

Insel, T. R. (2003). Is social attachment an addictive disorder?. Physiology & behavior, 79(3), 351-357.

Lowry CA, Lightman SL, Nutt DJ. That warm fuzzy feeling: brain serotonergic neurons and the regulation of emotion. J Psychopharmacol. 2009;23(4):392-400.

Pitcher, D., & Ungerleider, L. G. (2021). Evidence for a third visual pathway specialized for social perception. Trends in cognitive sciences, 25(2), 100-110.

Smit, M., Van Stralen, H. E., Van den Munckhof, B., Snijders, T. J., & Dijkerman, H. C. (2019). The man who lost his body: Suboptimal multisensory integration yields body awareness problems after a right temporoparietal brain tumour. Journal of neuropsychology, 13(3), 603-612.

Steinbeis, N. (2016). The role of self–other distinction in understanding others' mental and emotional states: neurocognitive mechanisms in children and adults. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1686), 20150074.

Stern, J. A., & Grossmann, T. (2024). The neuroscience of social relationships in early development.

Telzer, E. H., Kwon, S. J., & Jorgensen, N. A. (2023). Neurobiological development in adolescence and early adulthood: Implications for positive youth adjustment.

 

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.

We will begin our first day of class with an art session to kick off our program and get to know each other. Following this, we will explore Stockholm's oldest neighborhood with an outdoor escape game.

Later in the semester we will visit Framtidsmuseet (The Museum of the Future), where we will get to experience a variety of different technological advances such as VR, social robots, AI, and mixed reality. This visit, and the discussion around it, will set the backdrop of our class debate on the role of technology in social interactions and relationships.

Experiences during Core Course Week in both Stockholm and Malmö will alter sensory perception and/or social context and allow us to observe and experience how this impacts our social interactions. Examples of this include a graffiti workshop at Stockholm's urban art community, an escape game in the dark, cozying up at a cat cafe, trying disgusting foods from around the world, experiencing a traditional Swedish sauna & "kallbad", seeing the world's largest collective mural, learning about how technology and music therapy can aid societal inclusivity and connectedness, and touring an old viking town to hear about social traditions from the past and how they relate to social structures today.

For our long study tour, we will be visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina.  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, a nation with rich, complicated history, this tour delves deep into the profound interplay between the personal and communal connections we share. Examples of visits include an art therapy workshop, cooking together for the community, meeting local pyschology students, touring street art, visting a music therapy center for children affected by war, and exploring an ancient citadel, a giant waterfall and a nature preserve in the countryside of Herzegovina. 

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. This list may change during the semester.

Dr. Sabina Čehajić-Clancy works as an Associate Professor of Psychology at Stockholm University, where she leads a research group on Intergroup Relations and Social Change. She is an expert on psychology of conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation with a special focus on social-psychological approaches aimed at improving relations between groups in conflict. Currently, she is working on examining the impact of social context on intervention effectiveness and durability in order to design effective interventions which would fit a variety of different social contexts.

Kathinka Evers is a Professor of Philosophy, senior researcher at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB) at Uppsala University, Sweden, and Professor ad honor at the Universidad Central de Chile, Santiago. She has been Invited Professor on the Chair Condorcet at École Normale Supérieure, Paris (2002) and at Collège de France, Paris (2006 -7). 2013-21, she was a member of the Science and Infrastructure Board of the European Human Brain Project (HBP), leading the Philosophy and Neuroethics research. Today, she co-leads philosophy research in Horizon 2020-projects Neurotwin and CAVAA. Her research focuses on the philosophy of mind and brain, neuroethics, AI, and the development of artificial consciousness.

 

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 4 components: Attendance, Attentiveness, Contributions, and Presentations. Presentations will be based on the assigned reading and will occur throughout the semester, both in groups and individually. 

Study Tours:  You will be given a diary during the first field study. You will keep the diary throughout the course, in which you will reflect on how your social interactions and self-perception are impacted in different circumstances. Your diary can include observations of others too, to practice your observational research, orient to the culture, and aid in self-reflection. You will be given time at the end of each field study/academic visit to write in your journal while the experience is fresh. After the Long Study Tour you will write a reflective essay using the diary as a backbone. How have your self-perception and social ‘self’ changed across contexts and cultures? Which neural processes are implicated? How does this influence your relationships?

Additionally, for both CCW and LST you will work in pairs to become "tour guides" for an academic visit for which you will prepare a background/framing presentation, navigate us to the location, and lead a wrap-up discussion after the visit. 

Debate: You will be placed into two teams for a debate about the impact of technology on social interactions, relationships, and wellbeing. Our visit to the Museum of the Future and the discussion around it will provide the starting point, but your team will need to prepare outside of class using literature searches and material from the course.

Observational Research Project: The course will culminate in an observational research project that you will design, conduct, and present in oral and written forms. You will also be asked to peer review another student's paper.

Additional details for each assignment will be provided in class.

Grading

Assignment	Type	Percent
Class participation and engagement	Individual	20%
Study Tour Assignments	Team/Individual	20%
Debate	Team	20%
Observational Research Project	Individual	40%

 

Course Policies 

Attendance: You are expected to attend all DIS classes when scheduled.  If you miss a class for any reason, please contact me 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.

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 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:

• Course Enrollment and Grading
• Academic Expectations and Honor Code

 

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