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CHAPTER THREE The Brain and Social Development in Childhood
Erin D. Bigler
The human brain is a genetically driven, experience‐dependent organ that underlies all aspects of cognition and behavior, including social development (Holtmaat & Svoboda, 2009). As stated by Geschwind (1975) “every behavior has an anatomy.” Despite the factualness of those statements, how to study brain development and neural factors in child social development represents an enormous challenge. As reviewed by Lemerise and Arsenio (2000) and Rubin et al. (2009), well‐developed theoretical and behavioral approaches in the study of child social development have been established for some time, but until recently, research on linking brain development to social development has been limited. This has changed with 20th‐century advances in brain imaging (see Turesky et al., 2020), linking the “social brain,” as described by Kennedy and Adolphs (2012), to contemporaneously examined traditional metrics of child social development. Indeed, some argue that the highest order of neural processing in the human brain relates to social behavior (Decety, 2020; Gazzaniga, 1985). In this sense, how brain development is shaped by genes and environment to process and respond to social stimuli and exhibit and control social behavior is key to successful maturation.
The human brain is the most complex of all biological systems, where in the adult cerebral cortex, 100 trillion neural messages are being decoded at any point in time (Bertolero & Bassett, 2019; Micheva et al., 2020; Tompson et al., 2020). To appreciate this complexity and what it means for social brain development requires some basic understanding of neural cell development. As depicted in Figure 3.1, developmentally, synergistically, and mechanistically, how does the brain emerge from the union of two cells sharing their genetic code at the time of conception, to 9 months later, a brain formed by 200–300 billion neural cells that actually functions?
