OHBM 2026: Emotion and Social Neuroscience — does the social brain think better together, or just copy better together?

OHBM 2026 puts a powerful question on the table, even if it first appears in technical language: what happens to the mind when people enter a group? In the official program, the Emotion and Social Neuroscience session includes topics such as The Brain Network Underlying Social Participation, Tracking Emotion Regulation Through Dynamic Affective Transitions, and Mapping a Continuous Neural Signature for Decoding Social Distance from the Self. These titles already signal an important shift: neuroscience is not looking only at an isolated brain inside a scanner. It is beginning to look at participation, social distance, emotional regulation, and interaction.

That already adds scientific value. But from a Latin American perspective, it also opens a larger question: is the field still too attached to the individual as its primary unit? Is science already seeing the group as a living territory, or is “the social” still treated as something added later, on top of a supposedly self-contained brain? This is where a Decolonial Neuroscience reading begins to add depth.

In Brain Bee language, the question becomes much more direct:

When we enter a group, do we gain collective intelligence, or do we lose critical sense?

That question is simple, but it is extremely valuable. A large part of adolescent life between ages 14 and 17 revolves around exactly this: friendship, school, peer groups, social media, embarrassment, courage, influence, belonging, exclusion, and reputation. If neuroscience wants to understand real human behavior, it needs to measure not only individual decisions, but also what happens when bodies begin to feel together, when the rhythm of the group starts to matter, and when one person’s emotion changes another person’s attention.

This is where the avatar Jiwasa becomes especially useful. Jiwasa helps us move beyond “I think” and toward “we enter phase together,” “we regulate together,” and also “we can become captured together.” Within a congress like OHBM 2026, this speaks directly to Social Participation and Social Distance from the Self. But our contribution is to give this a stronger material grounding. It is not enough to say there is a neural signature of the social. The more alive question is: what kind of social? A social field that opens critical thought? A social field that produces courage? One that generates fear? One that captures?

Here a gentle but necessary critique of theory becomes important. A great deal of social neuroscience still relies on highly controlled designs that are clean, elegant, and often too poor in real life. The group becomes an experimental condition, but without territory, without history, without asymmetry of voice, without struggle for belonging. We measure cooperation, but not always silent submission. We measure choice, but not always the bodily cost of agreeing with the collective. We measure emotion, but not always who was truly free to feel differently.

That does not mean abandoning rigor. It means asking better questions.

A better question would be this:

At what point does belonging help people think together, and at what point does it begin to reduce critical autonomy?

That question matters for OHBM 2026, for Brain Bee, for schools, and for anyone trying to understand youth in Latin America. And it can be explored beautifully with EEG and NIRS.

A Brain Bee proposal for an EEG + NIRS experiment

The idea can be simple: compare adolescents solving challenges alone, in a cooperative group, and in a group pressured by a very confident leader. Tasks can involve image interpretation, ambiguous sentences, simple decisions, and error detection.

With EEG, we can observe markers of attention, surprise, and conflict, such as P300 and N400. With NIRS, we can track frontal regulatory effort and flexibility. The point is not only to see who gets more answers right, but to see how the group changes each person’s body and attention.

The central hypothesis is strong and direct: groups are not only sums of brains; they also modulate the bodily cost of disagreeing, making mistakes, or sustaining an independent reading. If this appears in EEG and NIRS, then we move beyond a shallow idea of the “social brain” and begin entering a neuroscience of lived belonging.

Where APUS and Math/Hep also matter

Even though Jiwasa is the main avatar here, this blog also speaks to APUS and Math/Hep.

APUS matters because a group is not only shared thought. A group is body in space, posture, distance, gaze, breathing, timing, and the feeling of invasion or welcome. If we want to do Decolonial Neuroscience seriously, we need to remember that the social happens in body-territory, not only in cognitive abstraction.

Math/Hep matters because method needs protection. It is very easy to romanticize synchrony. Not every synchrony is good. Not every coordination is collective intelligence. Sometimes a group synchronizes because it has become too rigid. Sometimes alignment is creative. Sometimes it is submission. So experimental design must separate living cooperation from silent capture.

This concern also resonates with the broader OHBM 2026 program, which shows clear interest in more ecological and naturalistic approaches. The keynote by Nanthia Suthana, for example, highlights human cognition in naturalistic environments, integrating high-density scalp EEG, wearable sensors, first-person video, and real-world behavior. That reinforces the idea that the next generation of neuroscience needs to move beyond the motionless brain and toward life as it is actually lived.

Why this matters for Latin America

In our region, the group has never been a minor detail. School life, community life, politics, religion, and digital life all carry a strong weight of belonging. That is why neuroscience developed here gains much more when it asks not only “what did the person think?” but also “in what collective did they think?”, “what did it cost to disagree?”, “who was able to speak?”, “which body withdrew?”, and “which body opened?”

This is especially important for adolescents. Between 14 and 17, many things are still being organized: self-concept, social courage, fear of exclusion, trust in one’s own judgment, and attentional plasticity. If Brain Bee Latam wants to inspire new scientific questions, this is fertile ground.

The beauty of this OHBM 2026 theme is that it already opens the door. Our role is to push that door a little further. Instead of only mapping the social brain, we can ask:

What kind of collective helps thought emerge?
What kind of collective makes a person merely repeat?
How does the body show this even before speech does?

When neuroscience begins to measure that, it stops being only a science of the observed brain and starts becoming a science of lived belonging.

References used in this blog

• OHBM 2026 — Oral Session “Emotion and Social Neuroscience”, including The Brain Network Underlying Social Participation, Tracking Emotion Regulation Through Dynamic Affective Transitions, and Mapping a Continuous Neural Signature for Decoding Social Distance from the Self.

• OHBM 2026 Schedule at a Glance — confirmation that Emotion and Social Neuroscience is scheduled as an oral session in the congress program.

• OHBM 2026 — keynote by Nanthia Suthana, highlighting human cognition in naturalistic environments with integration of EEG, wearable sensors, first-person video, and real-world behavior.