Welcome to the website of the Special Interest Research Group on the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment (SIRG SoNeAt). Please feel free to explore this and the remaining pages.

News & Announcements

SIRG SoNeAt was present at this year’s International Attachment Conference (IAC2024) in Rouen (France) from July 15-17.

We hosted a dedicated SIRG SoNeAt symposium with the title “Examining the Social Neuroscience of Parent-Child Attachment: Evidence from Across the Globe” on Wednesday July 17 from 11:00 to 12:30 (Room 2).

It was a great pleasure to see you there!

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you wish to follow up on some of our talks and discussions – a contact form can be found below.

SIRG SoNeAt Newsletters

We are very happy to bring you our SIRG SoNeAt Newsletters.

With our newsletters, we aim at keeping you up to date regarding any relevant events, publications and other newsworthy occurrences, as well as available resources related to the social neuroscience of human attachment.

If you would like to share information from your own research or promote your own events that fall within the scope of our SIRG SoNeAt, please get in touch with us by email or via the contact form below. Please also let us know by email if you want to be added to, or removed from our mailing list. Thank you.

Click here for SIRG SoNeAt Newsletter

SIRG SoNeAt Special Issue

SIRG SoNeAt is guest-editing a special issue on “The Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment” in the Journal Attachment & Human Development. The special issue was published as Volume 25 (2023).

In this special issue, we are highlighting the newest developments of this still very young field of research, point to its remaining questions and unresolved issues, and delineate possible avenues for the future – also in terms of practical applications related to prevention and intervention strategies in a clinical context. The overarching aim thereby is to elucidate whether and how social neuroscience may advance attachment theory during the 21st century.

Click here for SIRG SoNeAt Special Issue

General Description of SIRG SoNeAt

The goal of the SEAS SIRG SoNeAt is to promote a systematic social (cognitive affective) neuroscience approach to investigate the underlying biological and brain basis of human attachment. This goal reflects the overarching philosophy of social neuroscience that emerged as a novel integration of theories and experimental approaches from both neuroscience and psychology. In the case of SoNeAt, this means an emphasis of multi-modal and multi-method investigations combining data on (i) the biological and brain basis of human attachment derived from social neuroscience methods with (ii) theoretical constructs and experimental approaches from the comprehensive psychology framework of attachment theory. It is the hope of SoNeAt that such integrative strategy will help elucidating whether and how social neuroscience may advance attachment theory.

To achieve the above aim, SoNeAt would like to bring together people from various neuroscience and psychology backgrounds so that they can share their approaches and ideas. In line with the overarching philosophy of social neuroscience, SoNeAt is open to a wide range of experimental social neuroscience techniques across many levels of investigation and data acquired using both first- and second-person social neuroscience methods. Likewise, SoNeAt promotes the exchange of different psychological concepts and experimental approaches associated with attachment theory. In doing so, an active dialogue is sought with researchers interested in all aspects of social and interpersonal relationships, comprising, for example, caregiving, social isolation, loneliness, and many more.