Paul Zak, of Claremont Graduate University and Loma Linda University Medical Center, presents "The Neurobiology of Trust."

Speaker's abstract:

Appropriate social behaviors require an ability to gauge the trustworthiness of others. Indeed, distrust and paranoia appear in a variety of neurologic and psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, social anxiety disorder, autism, Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease, but the etiology of distrust is not well understood.  This presentation will review seven recent studies from Zak's lab that have begun to identify the neural substrates of trust and distrust in humans. An extensive animal literature identified the neuropeptide oxytocin as causally related to prosocial behavior with conspecifics, and the studies reviewed here have confirmed this in humans. Oxytocin appears to be vitally important for appropriate social behaviors and may provide a new target for treatments.