Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People. John T. Cacioppo, Penny S. Visser, and Cynthia L. Pickett (Eds.). 2006. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 328 pp., $45.00 (HB)

Perhaps not since the flowering of clinical neuropsychology thirty years ago have we seen this sense of exhilaration about the emergence of a new field through the integration of existing disciplines. Clearly, these authors and thinkers feel the same excitement that could be felt when new collaborations were being forged among neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and communication specialists in earlier decades. For the emerging field of social neuroscience, the parent fields include social psychology (see, for example, chapters on Race and Emotion, The Social Neuroscience of Stereotyping and Prejudice, Social and Physical Pain, and Animal Models of Human Attitudes), clinical neuropsychology (Neurological Substrates of Emotional and Social Intelligence: Evidence from Patients with Focal Brain Lesions), social cognition (Neural Substrates of Self Awareness, and three chapters bearing directly on Theory of Mind) and, of course, cognitive and basic neuroscience. Each chapter includes theoretical perspectives from multiple fields and reviews studies that use diverse techniques (including functional imaging, ERP, behavioral scales, lesion studies, developmental studies, and animal studies), although the book is very heavy on functional imaging data. As the editors acknowledge, animal and patient data are not represented in a thorough way.