Neural mechanisms of social homeostasis

Social homeostasis represents a mechanistic explanation for the phenomenon by which social groups maintain stability in structure. For example, how does an individual know their social rank and adjust their behaviour accordingly? How do individuals adapt to ever-changing social environments? Based on her experience in dissecting the neural circuits for emotional processing, Tye leads her team to explore social homeostasis at a circuits, systems, and behavioural level using modern neuroscience tools combined with cutting-edge computational approaches.

Tye will present her research program within the conceptual framework of social homeostasis, spanning both published and preliminary work. Over the past decade, the Tye Laboratory has identified neural circuits and systems involved in the key functional nodes of the social homeostatic system: detector system neurons that can evaluate the quality/quantity of social contact that provide this information forward to a control center, which stores an optimal set-point and computes deficits or surpluses that are detected and feed this forward to effector system neurons that can drive behaviours to rectify any deviations by interacting with the environment.

Next, Tye will present yet unpublished work exploring the experience of social pain, both in social exclusion and social isolation. Studying ethological behaviours requires the establishment of new types of data and new tools for analysis. She will unveil a new platform and analysis pipeline, including a novel analytical method to optimise for individual variability within a group, integrating multimodal empirical data to create biologically grounded predictive dynamical models for social homeostasis.