From the Society for Neuroscience press release:<\/p>\n
\nPeople are better at learning and decision-making when trying to avoid harm to others<\/strong>, according to new research published in\u00a0JNeurosci<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n
\nHumans are often motivated by self-interest<\/strong>. Participants in one study, for example, learned a game faster when they earned money for themselves as opposed to another person. However, this pattern changes when physical harm enters the equation<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
Lengersdorff et al. investigated how effectively people learn to avoid harm to themselves and others<\/strong>. While in an fMRI scanner, participants played an electric shock game. They chose between two abstract symbols: one had a high chance of delivering a non-painful electrical shock while the other had a low chance of delivering a painful shock. Computational modeling revealed that the participants were better at making optimal choices — resulting in the least amount of pain — when they chose for another person, rather than themselves<\/strong>. This could be explained by an increased sensitivity to the value of one choice over another<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
People most intent on avoiding shock showed increased activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC)<\/strong>, a brain area implicated in evaluating decisions<\/strong>. Choosing for another person was also associated with synchronized activity between the VMPFC<\/strong> and the temporoparietal junction<\/strong>, a region implicated in assessing the emotional states of others. This implies that other-related learning and decision-making stems from collaboration between the neural valuation system and the social brain<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
Manuscript title: When Implicit Prosociality Trumps Selfishness: The Neural Valuation System Underpins More Optimal Choices When Learning To Avoid Harm To Others Than To Oneself<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the Society for Neuroscience press release: People are better at learning and decision-making when trying to avoid harm to others, according to new research published in\u00a0JNeurosci. Humans are often… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":26693,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[526,6],"tags":[20,42,127,28,93],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32255"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32255"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32361,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32255\/revisions\/32361"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}