Neural signatures of prosocial behaviors.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Bellucci G
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7958651 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Background: It has been argued that prosocial behaviors and momentary rewards activate similar reward systems. However, a recent theoretical hypothesis encourages a fundamentally different view. Specifically, the social heuristic hypothesis posits that individuals internalize prosocial behaviors that are advantageous in their daily social life. These advantageous behaviors are fundamentally different from tangible and immediate reward. Objectives: Our objectives are to test a hypothesis that these advantageous prosocial behaviors are so critical to survival that it is necessary to have a neural system in the brain that leads people to maintain repeated social interactions. These neural systems are different from the computations of rewards because prosocial behaviors are not advantageous if only considering the computations of rewards. Methods: To deepen the understanding of the neural systems of prosocial behaviors and reward, we conducted activation likelihood estimation (ALE) to examine brain activation in prosocial behaviors and reward tasks. Results: Prosocial behaviors specifically activated distinct brain systems to a greater degree than reward. These systems were implicated in the processing of social behaviors and included the insula, temporal lobe, and superior temporal gyrus. By contrast, reward specifically activated the lentiform nucleus, thalamus, caudate nucleus, parahippocampal gyrus, and anterior cingulate cortex, which are associated with the brain reward system. Conclusions: These findings suggest that prosocial behaviors are different from reward and involve specific brain mechanisms.
| S-EPMC6707092 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The aim of this study was to explore the effects of prosocial and antisocial personality tendencies and context-related state factors on compliance with protective behaviors to prevent the spread of coronavirus infections. Six types of prosocial tendencies (altruism, dire, compliant, emotional, public, and anonymous) and selfishness as the antisocial tendency were included as personality factors, while fear related to the pandemic and empathy toward vulnerable groups (i.e., those in forced isolation) were context-related factors. Furthermore, mediation effect of empathy and moderation effect of fear were explored in relations between personality factors and protective behaviors. The sample included 581 participants (78.3% females). The data were collected from March 28 to April 6, 2020, during the emergency state and curfew in Serbia. The results showed that tendency to help anonymously had a positive effect and selfishness had a negative effect on protective behaviors, over and above demographic characteristics and context-related factors. Among context-related factors, only fear related to the pandemic had a significant unique positive effect on protective behaviors, but it had no moderator effect in the relationship between personality traits and protective behaviors. However, empathy acted as a mediator and partly accounted for the negative effect of selfishness and positive effect of tendency to help anonymously on protective behaviors. The results revealed that compliance with protective measures could be seen as prosocial and unselfish form of behavior. Furthermore, these findings have practical implications for shaping public messages and they can help effectively promote health-responsible behaviors.
| S-EPMC8062771 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Heroism has only recently become a topic of empirical investigation. Existing research suggests a connection between heroism and four well-documented dimensions of human social behavior: (1) the cost incurred by the actor; (2) the benefit provided to the recipient; (3) the perceived frequency (i.e., descriptive normativity); and (4) the perceived expectation to perform it (i.e., injunctive normativity). In a series of exploratory studies (total N = 408), we aim to shed light on how each of these constructs influence lay intuitions about the nature of heroism (i.e., what determines which acts people perceive to be heroic). In Study 1, subjects generated a list of acts they deemed to be heroic. In Study 2, subjects rated the heroicness of the acts from Study 1, revealing considerable variation in the level of heroism. Finally, subjects in Study 3 rated the cost to the actor, the benefit to the recipient(s), the descriptive normativity (i.e., frequency), and the injunctive normativity (i.e., obligatoriness) of ten acts, five of which received particularly high heroism scores in Study 2 ("exemplary" acts of heroism) and five of which received particularly low heroism scores in Study 2 ("ambiguous" acts of heroism). We find that more heroic acts are seen as rarer and more costly to actors-but, interestingly, not more beneficial to recipients or less obligatory. These findings help to illuminate what it means to be seen as a hero, and suggest clear future directions for both empirical and theoretical work.
| S-EPMC6370665 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectivesPrevious literature suggests age-related increases in prosociality. Does such an age-prosociality relationship occur during the COVID-19 pandemic, or might the pandemic-as a stressor that may differently influence young and older adults- create a boundary condition on the relationship? If so, can empathy, a well-known prosocial disposition, explain the age-prosociality relationship? The present study investigated these questions and whether the target (distant- compared to close-others) of prosocial behaviors differs by age.MethodParticipants completed a series of surveys on dispositional empathy and prosocial behaviors for a study assessing their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 330 participants (ages 18-89) from the USA who completed all of the surveys included in the present analyses.ResultsAge was positively related to greater prosocial during the pandemic. Although empathy was positively associated with individuals' prosociality, it did not account for the age-prosociality association. Interestingly, increasing age was associated with greater prosocial behaviors towards close-others (i.e., family, friends).DiscussionResults are discussed in the context of socioemotional goals, and substantiate that findings of age differences in prosocial behaviors occur during the period of limited resources and threat associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
| S-EPMC8411378 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The present study investigated how linguistic group membership influences prosocial behaviors, namely helpfulness and cooperation, in preschool children. Whilst research indicates that children preferentially direct their prosocial behavior towards members of their own groups, the influence of perceived linguistic group membership on actual helpfulness and cooperation has not been investigated. We presented an experimenter to 4- and 5-year-olds either as a foreigner, who did not speak the local language or as a native person. Children were then given the opportunity to help or cooperate with this experimenter in a series of nonverbal playful tasks. Whilst 4-year-olds helped and cooperated equally with the foreign and the native experimenter, 5-year-olds required significantly more cues and prompts in order to help or cooperate in the foreign condition. We also found that children were overall more reluctant to respond prosocially in the cooperation tasks than in the helping tasks. We tested children in two European countries (France and Hungary) and found the same pattern of responses in the two locations, suggesting that our findings are not specific to the local culture. Our results extend the findings of earlier research that showed selectivity according to the language spoken by the partner for sharing and imitation. Studies that looked at helpfulness or cooperation used the minimal group paradigm to induce group membership (based on arbitrary cues) and used indirect measures of prosociality, such as different forms of reasoning about the partner. In our study, we used language, a natural cue for group membership (versus arbitrary cues or cues based on social conventions) and directly observed children's helpful and cooperative behaviors toward the experimenter. Our results also confirm previous results indicating that with age, children become selective in their prosocial behaviors as they acquire new means of social evaluation and categorization. We conclude that the language associated with a potential social partner is not only a cue for affiliation and shared knowledge but also a cue mediating children's prosocial acts.
| S-EPMC7537885 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundSeveral studies suggest that prosocial behaviors gradually increase with age, but others report that prosocial behaviors are fixed traits with only minor fluctuations throughout the lifespan. Early life stress may help explain these inconsistencies, as distinct types of stress have been negatively or positively associated with prosocial behaviors.ObjectiveThis current investigation used two studies to test whether distinct types of early life stress moderated the association between age and prosocial behavior.Participants and settingStudy 1 recruited undergraduate students (n = 69) between the ages of 18-35, and Study 2 was conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk responders (n = 499) whose ages ranged from 18-74.MethodsStudy 1 employed behavioral economic tasks to measure cooperation and charitability, while Study 2 utilized an online survey to measure helping attitudes.ResultsModeration analyses revealed the association between age and cooperation was significantly weakened by a history of family violence (β=-0.37,p = 0.002), community violence (β=-0.30,p = 0.012), emotional abuse (β=-0.27,p = 0.026), and an overall summary score of early life stress (β=-0.33,p = 0.006). The relationship between age and charitability was only weakened by family violence (β=-0.24,p = 0.048). The association between age and helping attitudes was weakened by family violence (β=-0.10, p = 0.023), community violence (β=-0.13,p = 0.003), and physical neglect (β=-0.11,p = 0.018).ConclusionsCollectively, these results suggest that some types of early life stress, especially exposure to violent environments, may reduce the likelihood of prosocial behaviors increasing throughout the lifespan. This study suggests that age-related effects on prosocial behaviors may not be universal, but rather depend on individual differences in childhood stress.
| S-EPMC6814134 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain responses to biological motion in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), unaffected siblings (US) of children with ASD, and typically developing (TD) children has revealed three types of neural signatures: (i) state activity, related to the state of having ASD that characterizes the nature of disruption in brain circuitry; (ii) trait activity, reflecting shared areas of dysfunction in US and children with ASD, thereby providing a promising neuroendophenotype to facilitate efforts to bridge genomic complexity and disorder heterogeneity; and (iii) compensatory activity, unique to US, suggesting a neural system-level mechanism by which US might compensate for an increased genetic risk for developing ASD. The distinct brain responses to biological motion exhibited by TD children and US are striking given the identical behavioral profile of these two groups. These findings offer far-reaching implications for our understanding of the neural systems underlying autism.
| S-EPMC3000300 | biostudies-other
Project description:The dual hormone hypothesis, which centers on the interaction between testosterone and cortisol on social behavior, offers a compelling framework for examining the role of hormones on the neural correlates of adolescent peer conformity. Expanding on this hypothesis, the present study explored the interaction between testosterone and cortisol via hair concentrations on adolescents' conformity to peers. During fMRI, 136 adolescents (51 % female) ages 11-14 years (M = 12.32; SD = 0.6) completed a prosocial decision-making task. Participants chose how much of their time to donate to charity before and after observing a low- or high-prosocial peer. Conformity was measured as change in behavior pre- to post-observation. High testosterone with low cortisol was associated with greater conformity to high-prosocial peers but not low prosocial peers. Focusing on high prosocial peers, whole-brain analyses indicated greater activation post- vs. pre-observation as a function of high testosterone and low cortisol in regions implicated in social cognition, salience detection, and reward processing: pSTS/TPJ, insula, OFC, and caudate nucleus. Results highlight the relevance of hormones for understanding the neural correlates of adolescents' conformity to prosocial peers.
| S-EPMC7903062 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Gaze direction is a common social cue implying potential interpersonal interaction. However, little is known about the neural processing of social decision making influenced by perceived gaze direction. Here, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) method to investigate 27 females when they were engaging in an economic exchange game task during which photos of direct or averted eye gaze were shown. We found that, when averted but not direct gaze was presented, prosocial vs. selfish choices were associated with stronger activations in the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) as well as larger functional couplings between right STG and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Moreover, stronger activations in right STG was associated with quicker actions for making prosocial choice accompanied with averted gaze. The findings suggest that, when the cue implying social contact is absent, the processing of understanding others' intention and the relationship between self and others is more involved for making prosocial than selfish decisions. These findings could advance our understanding of the roles of subtle cues in influencing prosocial decision making, as well as shedding lights on deficient social cue processing and functioning among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
| S-EPMC5816754 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The transition from childhood to adolescence is marked by increasingly sophisticated social cognitive abilities that are paralleled by significant functional maturation of the brain. However, the role of social and neurobiological development in facilitating age differences in prosocial behavior remains unclear. Using a cross-sectional sample of children and adolescents (n = 51; 8-16 years), we examined the age-related correlates of prosocial behavior. Youth made costly and non-costly prosocial decisions to anonymous peers during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Among a subsample of youth who made prosocial decisions (n = 35), we found quadratic age differences in neural activation that peaked in early adolescence relative to childhood and older adolescence. In particular, early adolescents showed heightened recruitment of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), temporal pole and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) when engaging in costly prosocial behavior at the expense of gaining a reward, whereas they evoked heightened pSTS and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex/IFG activation when engaging in costly vs non-costly forms of prosocial behavior. Given that we did not find age differences in prosocial behavior, this suggests that early adolescents show unique patterns of brain activation to inform similar levels of prosocial behavior.
| S-EPMC6382927 | biostudies-literature