Social Psychophysiology

Jim Blascovich

Broadly defined, social psychophysiology is the study of human social behavior as it relates to and is revealed by physiological or bodily responses. Hence, social psychophysiologists investigate the interplay between social psychological and physiological processes. Generally, and in distinction to what has come to be known as social neuroscience, social psychophysiology focuses largely on the relationship between skeletalmuscular and visceral physiological processes controlled via the peripheral nervous system rather than on central nervous system or brain physiology. Although social psychophysiology's history can be traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans, its modern roots stem from theory and empirical work at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries by William James, James Cannon, Hans Selye, and others. By the late 1960s, an important chapter, “Physiological Approaches to Social Psychology,” that appeared in the second edition of the prestigious Handbook of Social Psychology , marked the recognition of ...

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