Dr. Pascal Vrticka

The Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment (SoNeAt): Insights from the First Twenty Years

As human beings, we are inherently social. Investigating both the benefits and costs of our social nature, also in association with its underlying neurobiology, therefore is of crucial importance. Over the last twenty years, we have been building the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment (SoNeAt) as a particularly well-suited interdisciplinary framework to do exactly that. In my talk, I will introduce SoNeAt and its core elements, including 1) the prototypical attachment pathways, 2) the functional neuroanatomical models of organised and disrupted/disorganised attachment (NAMA and NAMDA), 3) the link between attachment, homeostasis and social allostasis, as well as the most recent addition of 4) a cascading sequence of neurobiological events in attachment behaviour. For each of these elements, I will show how they provide valuable information on interpersonal processes that can either foster resilience or represent risk factors for disruption and trauma. Finally, I will focus on another more recent component of SoNeAt, the assessment of synchrony by means of hyperscanning as part of relational neuroscience. Here, the key question from an attachment perspective currently is whether more synchrony is always better for interaction and relationship quality. Spoiler alert: it may not!

Dr Pascal Vrtickais an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex (UK), where he heads the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment (SoNeAt) Lab. He supervises numerous PhD, MSc and BSc students. His academic career has taken him from a degree in biochemistry and neurobiology at ETH Zurich to a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Geneva and research stays at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, the Stanford School of Medicine and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. He worked there as a senior scientist and coordinated several funded interdisciplinary projects.