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Happy for Us not Them: Differences in neural activation in a vicarious reward task between family and strangers during adolescent development.

ABSTRACT: During adolescence social-interactions with other people become more relevant. One key aspect of these interactions is cooperative behavior. Cooperation relies on a set of cognitive and affective mechanisms. In this study, we focused on the mental ability to feel happy for another person's positive experience, called vicarious joy. We investigated the neural mechanisms of this ability using a false-choice vicarious reward fMRI task. Participants played a game where they could win monetary rewards for themselves, their mother, their father, and a stranger. A region-of-interest (ROI) analysis of the Nucleus Accumbens revealed robust activation in this region for personal reward as well as vicarious rewards for both parents. Vicarious reward for a stranger was not associated with activation within the Nucleus Accumbens. ROI activation was associated with self-reported vicarious joy for mother and father. A Prisoner's Dilemma game outside the scanner showed an increase in cooperative behavior until age 14 for parents and strangers, followed by a decline for the stranger but not for the parents. Together, these findings demonstrate that adolescence is an important time for developing ingroup-outgroup relations.

SUBMITTER: Brandner P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8319462 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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I am happy for us: Neural processing of vicarious joy when winning for parents versus strangers.

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Project description:Individuals experience reward not only when directly receiving positive outcomes (e.g., food or money), but also when observing others receive such outcomes. This latter phenomenon, known as vicarious reward, is a perennial topic of interest among psychologists and economists. More recently, neuroscientists have begun exploring the neuroanatomy underlying vicarious reward. Here we present a quantitative whole-brain meta-analysis of this emerging literature. We identified 25 functional neuroimaging studies that included contrasts between vicarious reward and a neutral control, and subjected these contrasts to an activation likelihood estimate (ALE) meta-analysis. This analysis revealed a consistent pattern of activation across studies, spanning structures typically associated with the computation of value (especially ventromedial prefrontal cortex) and mentalizing (including dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus). We further quantitatively compared this activation pattern to activation foci from a previous meta-analysis of personal reward. Conjunction analyses yielded overlapping VMPFC activity in response to personal and vicarious reward. Contrast analyses identified preferential engagement of the nucleus accumbens in response to personal as compared to vicarious reward, and in mentalizing-related structures in response to vicarious as compared to personal reward. These data shed light on the common and unique components of the reward that individuals experience directly and through their social connections.

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Project description:Individuals stably vary in their responses to rewards, but researchers have not yet determined whether sensitivity to rewarding outcomes translates across social and non-social contexts or whether different forms of reward sensitivity relate to distinct behavioral tendencies. We tested for responsiveness to different types of rewards by assessing individuals' neural sensitivity to personal vs. vicarious monetary reward outcomes and explored how responses to each related to prosociality and well-being. Forty-six participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning while winning money for themselves and observing a friend and stranger win money. All types of reward outcomes engaged the ventral striatum, but neural sensitivity to rewards for the self and for others were uncorrelated across individuals. Further, while sensitivity to rewards for the self or a close friend correlated with individuals' psychological well-being, only sensitivity to a friend's rewards correlated with individuals' prosociality. These findings highlight the value of independently assessing responsiveness to different types of reward and illuminate affective mechanisms that may promote prosocial behavior and well-being.

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Project description:Social feedback, such as praise or critique, profoundly impacts our mood and social interactions. It is unknown, however, how parents experience praise and critique about their child and whether their mood and neural responses to such 'vicarious' social feedback are modulated by parents' perceptions of their child. Parents (n = 60) received positive, intermediate and negative feedback words (i.e. personality characteristics) about their adolescent child during a magnetic resonance imaging scan. After each word, parents indicated their mood. After positive feedback their mood improved and activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus increased. Negative feedback worsened parents' mood, especially when perceived as inapplicable to their child, and increased activity in anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and precuneus. Parents who generally viewed their child more positively showed amplified mood responses to both positive and negative feedback and increased activity in dorsal striatum, inferior frontal gyrus and insula in response to negative feedback. These findings suggest that vicarious feedback has similar effects and engages similar brain regions as observed during feedback about the self and illustrates this is dependent on parents' beliefs of their child's qualities and flaws. Potential implications for parent-child dynamics and children's own self-views are discussed.

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Project description:Adolescence is a sensitive window for reward- and stress-associated behavior. Although stress during this period causes long-term changes in behavior in males, how females respond is relatively unknown. Here we show that social isolation stress in adolescence, but not adulthood, induces persistent but opposite effects on anxiety- and cocaine-related behaviors in male vs. female mice, and that these effects are reflected in transcriptional profiles within the adult medial amygdala (meA). By integrating differential gene expression with co-expression network analyses, we identified crystallin mu (Crym), a thyroid hormone binding protein, as a key driver of these transcriptional profiles. Manipulation of Crym specifically within adult meA neurons recapitulates the behavioral and transcriptional effects of social isolation and re-opens a window of plasticity that is otherwise closed. Our results establish that meA is essential for sex-specific responses to stressful and rewarding stimuli through transcriptional programming that occurs during adolescence.

2020-11-30 | GSE146472 | GEO

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Project description:Background. Adolescent marijuana use is associated with structural and functional differences in forebrain regions while performing memory and attention tasks. In the present study, we investigated neural processing in adolescent marijuana users experiencing rewards and losses. Fourteen adolescents with frequent marijuana use (>5 uses per week) and 14 nonuser controls performed a computer task where they were required to guess the outcome of a simulated coin flip while undergoing magnetic resonance imaging. Results. Across all participants, "Wins" and "Losses" were associated with activations including cingulate, middle frontal, superior frontal, and inferior frontal gyri and declive activations. Relative to controls, users had greater activity in the middle and inferior frontal gyri, caudate, and claustrum during "Wins" and greater activity in the anterior and posterior cingulate, middle frontal gyrus, insula, claustrum, and declive during "Losses." Effective connectivity analyses revealed similar overall network interactions among these regions for users and controls during both "Wins" and "Losses." However, users and controls had significantly different causal interactions for 10 out of 28 individual paths during the "Losses" condition. Conclusions. Collectively, these results indicate adolescent marijuana users have enhanced neural responses to simulated monetary rewards and losses and relatively subtle differences in effective connectivity.

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Project description:Humans appear to have an inherent prosocial tendency toward one another in that we often take pleasure in seeing others succeed. This fact is almost certainly exploited by game shows, yet why watching others win elicits a pleasurable vicarious rewarding feeling in the absence of personal economic gain is unclear. One explanation is that game shows use contestants who have similarities to the viewing population, thereby kindling kin-motivated responses (for example, prosocial behavior). Using a game show-inspired paradigm, we show that the interactions between the ventral striatum and anterior cingulate cortex subserve the modulation of vicarious reward by similarity, respectively. Our results support studies showing that similarity acts as a proximate neurobiological mechanism where prosocial behavior extends to unrelated strangers.

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