People are social beings and social interactions are very important to us. We are happy when our interactions with others are successful and become preoccupied when something goes wrong with this aspect of our lives. But the social brain, that is the part of the brain that controls social emotions and interactions, is still a mystery. Understanding how brain controls social life is one of the most fascinating quests of neuroscience. At the very fundamental level, we would like to know if there are specialized circuits controlling social emotions. And even further - do positive and negative social emotions come together - or are there separate neuronal pathways controlling these two kinds of emotions? The problem is that we have no means of addressing these important questions directly in human studies. The resolution of brain functional imaging is just not good enough. Fortunately, the required resolution, at the level of single cells, is offered by the techniques used in animal models. Using simple rodent models, we have developed we are able to look for the neuronal circuits within the amygdala, a key structure processing emotions in the brain, which controls social negative and positive emotions. We use genetic constructs that allow for stimulation or inhibition of activity-defined neuronal subpopulations to learn their function. Our ultimate goal is to characterize neuronal circuits in the amygdala involved in control of negative and positive social emotions and to determine whether they are different from neural circuits controlling non-social emotions, i.e. whether there is specialized social brain. Gaining such knowledge is important to understand impairments of social interactions observed in many psychiatric disorders.