Weizhe Hong

Excited to share our latest work in @Nature showing shared neural substrates for parenting and prosocial helping behavior - fantastic work by @Fangmiao4, @KaylaYingYan, and Emily Wu. Full text available here: rdcu.be/e6PnY

@moccalin Amazing work! Congratulations, Dayu!

What has changed in mama bear brain (well, actually mice) to make her risk her life to attack a potential threat and protect her young? Oxytocin is the key! Happy to share our new study led by two awesome postdocs: Takashi Yamaguchi and Rongzhen Yan. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Symposium submissions are due tomorrow, March 31, 2026!

@SMikulovic @NatureNeuro @tararaam_ Thanks Sanja!

@TheHongLab @NatureNeuro Another fantastic piece of work! Huge congratulations, @tararaam_ and @TheHongLab!

We often think of survival as an individual act. But when facing hardship together, social groups may function more like a unified system than a collection of separate individuals Excited to share our latest work @NatureNeuro on collective social dynamics rdcu.be/e8LrV

Interestingly, silencing the activity of this region selectively reduced active decisions in targeted mice but elicited compensatory increases in non-manipulated partners, preserving overall group-level huddle time.

At the neural level, we found that the prefrontal cortex tracks not just an individual's own choices, but also those made by its social partners, suggesting the brain continuously models others to enable coordinated group behavior.

Symposium Proposal Deadline Extended! 2026 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Neuroscience (S4SN 2026) will take place in Montréal, Canada, August 23–26, 2026 The deadline for symposium proposals has been extended to Tuesday, March 31 Learn more: s4sn.org/s4sn2026

We find that specific neurons in the medial preoptic area that regulate parenting are also critical for comforting behavior toward adults. This suggests that neural systems evolved for offspring care may have provided a scaffold for broader prosocial support between adults.

While prosocial helping behavior is hypothesized to have an evolutionary root in caring for vulnerable newborn offspring, whether the neural substrates underlying parenting may contribute to adult-directed prosocial helping behaviors remains largely unclear.

Excited to share our latest work in @Nature showing shared neural substrates for parenting and prosocial helping behavior - fantastic work by @Fangmiao4, @KaylaYingYan, and Emily Wu. Full text available here: rdcu.be/e6PnY

Join us in beautiful Montreal for the 2026 S4SN Conference (Aug 23–26)! Share your latest research, spark new collaborations, and engage with a vibrant social neuroscience community! Symposium proposals and individual abstract submissions are underway: event.fourwaves.com/s4sn2026/pages

We’re excited to share our latest review article (with @JanineJiang22 and @stevewcchang) synthesizing current insights into the behavioral manifestations and neural basis of cooperative behavior: authors.elsevier.com/a/1meNt3Q9h2Q4…

@morishih Thank you so much for moderating this session!

Please join tomorrow from 9am a highly anticipated Meet-the-Expert session by Dr. Weizhe Hong (UCLA) @TheHongLab, a leader in the field of social neuroscience! I am thrilled to moderate this session at room 5B #sfn25 #sfn2025

@IshmailSaboor Congratulations Ish!!

I’m extremely honored to be a recipient of the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award!

@guo_lab @NatureNeuro @YaleNeuro @Yale_INP Congratulations Junjie!!🎉🎉

Excited to see this beautiful art, commissioned from the Chinese artist 懒云居画 (@subaiweipainting on Instagram), on this month's cover of @NatureNeuro! @YaleNeuro @Yale_INP

@moccalin @pgolshani @ScienceMagazine @JanineJiang22 @JonathanCKao Thanks Dayu!

@TheHongLab @pgolshani @ScienceMagazine @JanineJiang22 @JonathanCKao Congrats again! Hope all is well.

We are excited to share our latest work in @ScienceMagazine studying cooperative behavior in both biological and artificial intelligence systems — fantastic work by @JanineJiang22, Linfan Gu, and wonderful collaboration with @JonathanCKao! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

We extended our findings to artificial intelligence systems by training artificial agents in a similar cooperation task using multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). The agents developed behavioral strategies and neural representations reminiscent of those observed in the biological brain, revealing parallels between cooperative behavior in biological and artificial systems.

We identified key social behavioral strategies and decision-making processes in mice that facilitate successful cooperation. We found that these processes are represented at both single-cell and population levels in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and demonstrated a causal role for ACC activity in cooperation.