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Even in our highly interconnected modern world, geographic factors play an important role in human social connections. Similarly, social relationships influence how and where we travel, and how we think about our spatial world. Here, we review the growing body of neuroscience research that is revealing multiple interactions between social and spatial processes in both humans and non-human animals. We review research on the cognitive and neural representation of spatial and social information, and highlight recent findings suggesting that underlying mechanisms might be common to both. We discuss how spatial factors can influence social behaviour, and how social concepts modify representations of space. In so doing, this review elucidates not only how neural representations of social and spatial information interact but also similarities in how the brain represents and operates on analogous information about its social and spatial surroundings. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The spatial–social interface: a theoretical and empirical integration’. 

Parents’ alcohol use may influence adolescent substance use and substance use intentions. Prior research has linked adolescents’ emotion reactivity with parental drinking behaviors and adolescent substance use. The present study investigated whether sub-clinical maternal alcohol use relates to adolescent neural emotion reactivity and substance use intentions in early adolescence. Early adolescents ( N = 70) viewed emotional images during a fMRI scan and completed a questionnaire about substance use intentions. Their mothers reported past 30-day alcohol use. Results showed that greater frequency of maternal alcohol use predicted adolescents’ substance use intentions. In addition, maternal alcohol use predicted adolescent blunted responses to positive emotional images in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and bilateral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). There was no relationship between neural emotion reactivity and adolescent substance use intentions. Findings suggest that parental alcohol use may relate to adolescent’s development of reward and positive emotion processing systems, even at sub-clinical levels of drinking.