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Increased similarity of neural responses to experienced and empathic distress in costly altruism.

ABSTRACT: Empathy-affective resonance with others' sensory or emotional experiences-is hypothesized to be an important precursor to altruism. However, it is not known whether real-world altruists' heightened empathy reflects true self-other mapping of multi-voxel neural response patterns. We investigated this relationship in adults who had engaged in extraordinarily costly real-world altruism: donating a kidney to a stranger. Altruists and controls completed fMRI testing while anticipating and experiencing pain, and watching as a stranger anticipated and experienced pain. Machine learning classifiers tested for shared representation between experienced and observed distress. Altruists exhibited more similar representations of experienced and observed fearful anticipation spontaneously and following an empathy prompt in anterior insula and anterior/middle cingulate cortex, respectively, suggesting heightened empathic proclivities and abilities for fear. During pain epochs, altruists were distinguished by spontaneous empathic responses in anterior insula, anterior/mid-cingulate cortex and supplementary motor area, but showed no difference from controls after the empathy prompt. These findings (1) link shared multi-voxel representations of the distress of self and others to real-world costly altruism, (2) reinforce distinctions between empathy for sensory states like pain and anticipatory affective states like fear, and (3) highlight the importance of differentiating between the proclivity and ability to empathize.

SUBMITTER: O'Connell K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6656917 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Testosterone plays a key role in shaping human social behavior. Recent findings have linked testosterone to altruistic behavior in economic decision tasks depending on group membership and intergroup competition. The preferential treatment of ingroup members, while aggression and discrimination is directed towards outgroup members, has been referred to as parochial altruism. Here we investigated in two consecutive studies, whether testosterone is associated with parochial altruism depending on individual tendency for costly punishment. In the first study, 61 men performed a single-shot ultimatum game (UG) in a minimal group context, in which they interacted with members of an ingroup and outgroup. In the second study, 34 men performed a single-shot UG in a more realistic group context, in which they responded to the proposals of supporters of six political parties during the German election year 2017. Political parties varied in their social distance to the participants' favorite party as indicated by an individual ranking. Participants of study 2 also performed a cued recall task, in which they had to decide whether they had already encountered a face during the previous UG (old-new decision). In order to make the UG data of study 2 most comparable to the data of study 1, the rejection rates of several parties were combined according to the social distance ranking they achieved. Parties ranked 1 to 3 formed the relatively close and favored 'ingroup' that shared similar political values with the participant (e.g., left wing parties), while the 'outgroup' consisted of parties ranked from 4 to 6 with more distant or even antagonistic political views (e.g., conservative to right wing parties). In both studies, results showed a parochial pattern with higher rejection rates made in response to outgroup compared to ingroup offers. Interestingly, across studies higher salivary testosterone was associated with higher rejection rates related to unfair outgroup offers in comparison to the unfair offers made by ingroup members. The present findings suggest that latent intergroup biases during decision-making may be positively related to endogenous testosterone. Similar to previous evidence that already indicated a role of testosterone in shaping male parochial altruism in male soccer fans, these data underscore the general, yet rather subtle role of male testosterone also in other social settings.

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Increased similarity of neural responses to experienced and empathic distress in costly altruism.

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