Short Courses in Neuroeconomics and Social Neuroscience

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PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT Many financial and social decisions made throughout life can powerfully influence health outcomes in old age. To address these issues, two multidisciplinary areas of life-span research have emerged in recent years: neuroeconomics and social neuroscience. Despite the promise of these areas, unfortunately it remains rare for individual institutions to provide truly multidisciplinary training opportunities in either neuroeconomics or social neuroscience. The proposed activities will address this by offering workshops and summer schools to a broad audience of junior scientists all over the country. The goal of neuroeconomics is to better understand human decision making. Neuroeconomics uses an economic approach to understanding decision behavior that can potentially be generalized not only for the maximization of financial well being but also mental and physical health. Social neuroscience integrates multiple areas of psychology and neuroscience to better understand human social behavior. The social neuroscience approach identifies ways to optimize social, emotional, and physical health and well being. The primary goal of the proposed training activities is to provide the attendees with a broad base of knowledge and skills from the many subfields within neuroeconomics and social neuroscience. Another goal of the proposed events is to begin to bring together the neuroeconomics and social neuroscience communities for an even more integrative approach. Social neuroscience and neuroeconomics have largely grown up as separate fields, with separate conferences and very little cross-talk between communities despite a great deal of overlap in research interests (e.g., neural mechanisms of affective and social decision making, learning and valuation). To better understand the predictors of and strategies for optimizing health and well being in old age, scientific life-span research will need to continue to further integrate approaches, evidence, and theories from multiple disciplines given the multi-dimensional contributions to long-term health and well being. We expect that the novel training activities proposed here will increase the number of future scientists effectively working at the intersection of multiple fields which will promote creativity, facilitate communication across areas, introduce novel applications of methods and approaches to other areas, and promote more creative science.