The mounting capabilities and increased application of fMRI has propelled a vast expansion of the study of neural substrates for social cognition. Beyond characterizing common and separable brain systems for identifying facial and vocal emotions (Leitman et al., 2010), studies have examined social cognition domains such as moral judgment (Greene, 2015), sexual attraction (Bolomont et al., 2014), response to baby schema (Glocker et al., 2009), empathy (Bruneau et al., 2015; Rêgo et al., 2015), and deception (Langleben et al., 2005). More recent studies have examined effects of risk taking and reward valuations, linking limbic with cortico-striatal pathways (Cox and Kable, 2014; Doll et al., 2015). The overlap in activation between facial emotion identification tasks and other social cognition tasks underscores the need to define aspects of emotion processing with dissociable neuronal representations, such as facial feature perception relative to empathy. Results of such studies have yielded, and will continue to offer multiple behavioral measures related to social cognition that can link to specific brain systems and can serve as domain measures relatable to psychopathology as envisioned by the RDoC initiative.
