In the broader context of psychology, Social Cognition has been a topic of study by social psychologists (e.g. Fiske and Taylor, 1991), and some concepts and paradigms have been productively adapted to clinical psychology, especially in relation to schizophrenia (see review in Penn, Sanna & Roberts, 2008 and chapters in Roberts & Penn, 2012). Within cognitive neuroscience, social cognition has been defined narrowly and broadly. The narrow definition considers social cognition as a branch of cognitive psychology originating from the work of Neal Miller and Albert Bandura, who highlighted the role of modeling and motivation in learning. A broader definition considers the domain of social cognition to encompass behavior related to contact with the context of other conspecifics, and some would argue that other species should be included in the human’s social environment. The field itself, as is usually the case, did not much consider definitional constraints. Studies include work on fear conditioning in rodents, affect discrimination in faces and voices in various clinical populations, measures of “empathy” and of “implicit bias”, and functional neuroimaging studies during activation with socially
