By bringing most recent findings on social cognition (body language reading, facial assessment of social counterparts, and reading in the eyes and covered faces) along with advanced neuroimaging strategies, I intend to conceive perspectives, open questions, and limitations in our understanding of the social brain in neuropsychiatric disorders. The social brain has many facets playing decisive role in majority of neuropsychiatric conditions such as autistic spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, and depression. I will focus on the following issues: (i) Neuroimaging of the social brain: With the advent of sophisticated techniques over the past decades, brain imaging has energized the rapidly developing field of social neuroscience, and has sparked a wide range of research in neuropsychiatry. Yet brain imaging faces with a set of issues that must be addressed. One of them is time, which is a key to understanding the organization of functional networks, since brain topography alone does not allow us to understand neural communication as well as pathological changes in brain activation; (ii) Behavior and brain activity: This relationship is far from  simple even in individuals, free from the rich complexities of psychopathology; and (iii) Sex specificity of the social brain: Many neuropsychiatric disorders characterized by aberrant social cognition display a skewed sex ratio: females and males are affected differently in terms of clinical picture, prevalence, and severity. Currently, we are only beginning to understand the origins of gender/sex specificity.