Empathy for wildlife: The importance of the individual

Because climate change and the biodiversity crisis are driven by human actions, determining psychological mechanisms underpinning support for environmental action is an urgent priority. Here, we experimentally tested for mechanisms promoting conservation-related motivation and behavior toward a flagship species, wild Tamanend's bottlenose dolphins. Following evidence that empathy increases prosocial motivations and behavior, and that the ability to identify individual humans promotes empathy, we tested whether this relationship applied to the ability to identify individual dolphins. Participants identified dolphins from their dorsal fins at above chance levels, and better individuation correlated with higher empathy for dolphins and higher willingness to pledge environmental behaviors. Pairing a narrative with an image of an injured dolphin leads to higher donations relative to a narrative alone. Our novel finding that the ability to individually identify dolphins relates to empathy and conservation-related behavior suggests pathways for strengthening environmental attitudes and behavior.

Fearlessness as an Underlying Mechanism Leading to Conduct Problems: Testing the INTERFEAR Model in a Community Sample in Spain

Conduct problems (CP) in childhood and adolescence have a significant impact on the individual, family, and community. To improve treatment for CP, there is a need to improve the understanding of the developmental pathways leading to CP in boys and girls. Prior research has linked the child's fearlessness and callous-unemotional (CU) traits, as well as experiences of parental warmth and punitive parenting, to CP. However, few studies have tested the interplay of these factors in contributing to future CP development. The present study aimed to test the InterFear model, which suggests that fearlessness in early childhood leads to CP through an indirect pathway involving low positive parenting, high negative/punitive parenting, and callous-unemotional (CU) traits. The sample included 2467 Spanish children (48.1% girls; Mage = 4.25; SD = 0.91), followed up across a five-year period. Besides a direct association between fearlessness in early childhood and future CP, the results found an indirect pathway whereby fearlessness reduces positive parenting and increases punitive parenting, which contributes to the development of CU traits and sets the stage for CP in later childhood. The specific indirect effect from fearlessness to CP via CU traits accounted for most of the variance, suggesting the existence of a temperamental pathway independent of parental variables. Further, two additional indirect pathways, exclusive of fearlessness, were identified, which started with low parental warmth and positive parenting, leading to CP via CU traits. These findings support the InterFear model, demonstrating multiple pathways to CP with the involvement of fearlessness, parenting practices, and CU traits. This model might play a pivotal role in the development of targeted prevention and intervention strategies for CP.

Intergenerational concern relates to constructive coping and emotional reactions to climate change via increased legacy concerns and environmental cognitive alternatives

As the threat of climate change looms large, and we experience first-hand the impacts of rapid global warming, researchers and clinicians emphasize the need to better understand the impact of these changes on our mental health. Existing research suggests that coping with and emotional reactions to climate change can promote action to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change and reduce its negative impacts to one's mental health. In this pre-registered study (N = 771) we examined whether people who display extreme intergenerational concern would also constructively cope with climate change. Empirically-identified individuals showing high intergenerational concern reported more problem-focused and meaning-based coping, and less avoidant coping strategies with climate change. Further, even though they felt guilty, angry, sorrowful and isolated, these individuals also felt hopeful about the future. These effects were explained by increased concerns about one's legacy and higher access to environmental cognitive alternatives. By instilling values that highlight intergenerational concern as a key priority, we could thus not only increase pro-climate action, but also help individuals actively and constructively cope with changes produced by climate change.

Gratitude Is Morally Sensitive

Helping acts, however well intended and beneficial, sometimes involve immoral means or immoral helpers. Here, we explore whether help recipients consider moral evaluations in their appraisals of gratitude, a possibility that has been neglected by existing accounts of gratitude. Participants felt less grateful and more uneasy when offered immoral help (Study 1, N = 150), and when offered morally neutral help by an immoral helper (Study 2, N = 172). In response to immoral help or helpers, participants were less likely to accept the help and less willing to strengthen their relationship with the helper even when they accepted it. Study 3 (N = 276) showed that recipients who felt grateful when offered immoral help were perceived as less likable, less moral, and less suitable as close relationship partners than those who felt uneasy by observers. Our results demonstrate that gratitude is morally sensitive and suggest this might be socially adaptive.

Lower maternal emotional availability is related to increased attention toward fearful faces during infancy

It has been suggested that infants' age-typical attention biases for faces and facial expressions have an inherent connection with the parent-infant interaction. However, only a few previous studies have addressed this topic. To investigate the association between maternal caregiving behaviors and an infant's attention for emotional faces, 149 mother-infant dyads were assessed when the infants were 8 months. Caregiving behaviors were observed during free-play interactions and coded using the Emotional Availability Scales. The composite score of four parental dimensions, that are sensitivity, structuring, non-intrusiveness, and non-hostility, was used in the analyses. Attention disengagement from faces was measured using eye tracking and face-distractor paradigm with neutral, happy, and fearful faces and scrambled-face control pictures as stimuli. The main finding was that lower maternal emotional availability was related to an infant's higher attention to fearful faces (p = .042), when infant sex and maternal age, education, and concurrent depressive and anxiety symptoms were controlled. This finding indicates that low maternal emotional availability may sensitize infants' emotion processing system for the signals of fear at least during this specific age around 8 months. The significance of the increased attention toward fearful faces during infancy is an important topic for future research.

The Causal Role of Temporoparietal Junction in Mediating Self-Other Mergence during Mentalizing

Mentalizing is a core faculty of human social behaviors that involves inferring the cognitive states of others. This process necessitates adopting an allocentric perspective and suppressing one's egocentric perspective, referred to as self-other distinction (SOD). Meanwhile, individuals may project their own cognitive states onto others in prosocial behaviors, a process known as self-other mergence (SOM). It remains unclear how the two opposing processes coexist during mentalizing. We here combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) techniques with intranasal oxytocin (OTint) as a probe to examine the SOM effect in healthy male human participants, during which they attributed the cognitive states of decision confidence to an anonymous partner. Our results showed that OTint facilitated SOM via the left temporoparietal junction (lTPJ), but did not affect neural representations of internal information about others' confidence in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which might be dedicated to SOD, although the two brain regions, importantly, have been suggested to be involved in mentalizing. Further, the SOM effect induced by OTint was fully mediated by the lTPJ activities and became weakened when the lTPJ activities were suppressed by rTMS. These findings suggest that the lTPJ might play a vital role in mediating SOM during mentalizing.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Every human mind is unique. It is critical to distinguish the minds of others from the self. On the contrary, we often project the current mental states of the self onto others; that is to say, self-other mergence (SOM). The neural mechanism underlying SOM remains unclear. We here used intranasal oxytocin (OTint) as a probe to leverage SOM, which is typically suppressed during mentalizing. We revealed that OTint specifically modulated the left temporoparietal junction (lTPJ) neural activities to fully mediate the SOM effect, while suppressing the lTPJ neural activities by transcranial magnetic stimulations causally attenuated the SOM effect. Our results demonstrate that the lTPJ might mediate SOM during social interactions.

Human Amygdala Volumetric Patterns Convergently Evolved in Cooperatively Breeding and Domesticated Species

The amygdala is a hub in brain networks that supports social life and fear processing. Compared with other apes, humans have a relatively larger lateral nucleus of the amygdala, which is consistent with both the self-domestication and the cooperative breeding hypotheses of human evolution. Here, we take a comparative approach to the evolutionary origin of the relatively larger lateral amygdala nucleus in humans. We carry out phylogenetic analysis on a sample of 17 mammalian species for which we acquired single amygdala nuclei volumetric data. Our results indicate that there has been convergent evolution toward larger lateral amygdala nuclei in both domesticated and cooperatively breeding mammals. These results suggest that changes in processing fearful stimuli to reduce fear-induced aggression, which are necessary for domesticated and cooperatively breeding species alike, tap into the same neurobiological proximate mechanism. However, humans show changes not only in processing fearful stimuli but also in proactive prosociality. Since cooperative breeding, but not domestication, is also associated with increased proactive prosociality, a prominent role of the former during human evolution is more parsimonious, whereas self-domestication may have been involved as an additional stepping stone.

Neural responses underlying extraordinary altruists' generosity for socially distant others

Most people are much less generous toward strangers than close others, a bias termed social discounting. But people who engage in extraordinary real-world altruism, like altruistic kidney donors, show dramatically reduced social discounting. Why they do so is unclear. Some prior research suggests reduced social discounting requires effortfully overcoming selfishness via recruitment of the temporoparietal junction. Alternatively, reduced social discounting may reflect genuinely valuing strangers' welfare more due to how the subjective value of their outcomes is encoded in regions such as rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and amygdala. We tested both hypotheses in this pre-registered study. We also tested the hypothesis that a loving-kindness meditation (LKM) training intervention would cause typical adults' neural and behavioral patterns to resemble altruists. Altruists and matched controls (N = 77) completed a social discounting task during functional magnetic resonance imaging; 25 controls were randomized to complete LKM training. Neither behavioral nor imaging analyses supported the hypothesis that altruists' reduced social discounting reflects effortfully overcoming selfishness. Instead, group differences emerged in social value encoding regions, including rostral ACC and amygdala. Activation in these regions corresponded to the subjective valuation of others' welfare predicted by the social discounting model. LKM training did not result in more generous behavioral or neural patterns, but only greater perceived difficulty during social discounting. Our results indicate extraordinary altruists' generosity results from the way regions involved in social decision-making encode the subjective value of others' welfare. Interventions aimed at promoting generosity may thus succeed to the degree they can increase the subjective valuation of others' welfare.

Enemy or friend: the personal and the factual patient-physician relationship

Physicians are expected to place the patient's interests above their own. Such prioritization has worldwide consent. It constitutes the difference between medicine and other professions. The present conceptual opinion paper summarizes the authors' clinical experience with patient care and student teaching during the last 45 years. The authors comment on their own conception by referring to present debates and prominent statements from the past. Fundamental changes in medicine have taken place over the last five decades. New diseases have emerged while diagnostic and therapeutic options for patients have grown steadily - along with healthcare costs. At the same time, economic and legal constraints for physicians have increased, as has moral pressure. The interaction of physicians with patients has gradually shifted from a personal to a factual relationship. In the factual, more formal relationship, the patient and physician represent equal partners of a legal contract, which jeopardizes the prioritization of the patient's interests. The formal relationship implies defensiveness. By contrast, in the personal relationship, the physician adopts an existentialist commitment while simultaneously enabling and respecting the patient's autonomous decision-making. The authors argue for the personal relationship. However, the patient and physician are no friends. Consequently, the physician in effect competes with the patient from a knowledge-based but opposite position. Both need to make efforts to consent and maintain the relationship even when they dissent. This implies that the physician does not simply comply with the patient's wishes.

Unselfish traits and social decision-making patterns characterize six populations of real-world extraordinary altruists

Acts of extraordinary, costly altruism, in which significant risks or costs are assumed to benefit strangers, have long represented a motivational puzzle. But the features that consistently distinguish individuals who engage in such acts have not been identified. We assess six groups of real-world extraordinary altruists who had performed costly or risky and normatively rare (<0.00005% per capita) altruistic acts: heroic rescues, non-directed and directed kidney donations, liver donations, marrow or hematopoietic stem cell donations, and humanitarian aid work. Here, we show that the features that best distinguish altruists from controls are traits and decision-making patterns indicating unusually high valuation of others' outcomes: high Honesty-Humility, reduced Social Discounting, and reduced Personal Distress. Two independent samples of adults who were asked what traits would characterize altruists failed to predict this pattern. These findings suggest that theories regarding self-focused motivations for altruism (e.g., self-enhancing reciprocity, reputation enhancement) alone are insufficient explanations for acts of real-world self-sacrifice.

Callous-Unemotional Traits and Social Adjustment among Chinese Preschoolers: The Moderating Role of Teacher-Child Relationship

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are associated with social adjustment difficulties, but few studies have examined the underlying mechanisms in Chinese preschoolers. This study examined the relationship between CU traits and social adjustment among Chinese preschoolers as well as the moderating role of the teacher-child relationship in the association. Participants were 484 preschool children aged 3-6 years old from Shanghai, China (Mage = 5.56 years, SD = 0.96 years). Parents reported children's CU traits and teachers reported their relationship with children and rated children's social adjustment as well. The results revealed that (1) children with higher CU traits positively related to aggressive and asocial behavior with peers, but negatively related to prosocial behavior; (2) the teacher-child relationship moderated the relationship between CU traits and social adjustment in children. Specifically, teacher-child conflict exacerbated the aggressive and asocial behavior of children with CU traits and reduced the prosocial behavior of children with CU traits. These findings extended the current research on CU traits and had important implications for early interventions targeted at children with CU traits.

From Oxytocin to Compassion: The Saliency of Distress

Compassion is a warm response of care and concern for those who are suffering, which drives individuals to devote their resources for the sake of others. A prominent neuroevolutionary framework grounds compassion in the neurobiology of the mammalian caregiving system. Accordingly, it has been suggested that the oxytocinergic system, which plays a central role in parental caregiving and bonding, provides the neurobiological foundation for compassion towards strangers. Yet, the specific role of oxytocin in compassion is far from clear. The current paper aims to target this gap and offer a theoretical framework that integrates the state-of-the-art literature on oxytocin with research on compassion. We suggest that oxytocin mediates compassion by enhancing the saliency of cues of pain and distress and discuss the plausible underlying neurobiological substrates. We further demonstrate how the proposed framework can account for individual differences in compassion, focusing on the effects of attachment on caregiving and support. The proposed framework integrates the current scientific understanding of oxytocin function with compassion-related processes. It thus highlights the largely ignored attentional processes in compassion and taps into the vast variability of responses in social contexts involving pain and suffering.

Social value at a distance: Higher identification with all of humanity is associated with reduced social discounting

How much we value the welfare of others has critical implications for the collective good. Yet, it is unclear what leads people to make more or less equal decisions about the welfare of those from whom they are socially distant. The current research sought to explore the psychological mechanisms that might underlie welfare judgements across social distance. Here, a social discounting paradigm was used to measure the tendency for the value of a reward to be discounted as the social distance of its recipient increased. Across two cohorts (one discovery, one replication), we found that a more expansive identity with all of humanity was associated with reduced social discounting. Additionally, we investigated the specificity of this association by examining whether this relationship extended to delay discounting, the tendency for the value of a reward to be discounted as the temporal distance to its receipt increases. Our findings suggest that the observed association with identity was unique to social discounting, thus underscoring a distinction in value-based decision-making processes across distances in time and across social networks. As data were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also considered how stress associated with this global threat might influence welfare judgements across social distances. We found that, even after controlling for COVID-19 related stress, correlations between identity and social discounting held. Together, these findings elucidate the psychological processes that are associated with a more equal distribution of generosity.

Modeling Variation in Empathic Sensitivity Using Go/No-Go Social Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances in computational behavioral modeling can help rigorously quantify differences in how individuals learn behaviors that affect both themselves and others. But social learning remains understudied in the context of understanding individual variation in social phenomena like aggression, which is defined by persistent engagement in behaviors that harm others. We adapted a go/no-go reinforcement learning task across social and non-social contexts such that monetary gains and losses explicitly impacted the subject, a study partner, or no one. We then quantified participants' (n = 61) sensitivity to others' rewards, sensitivity to others' losses, and the Pavlovian influence of expected outcomes on approach and avoidance behavior. Results showed that subjects learned in response to punishments and rewards that affected their partner in a way that was computationally similar to how they learned for themselves, consistent with the possibility that social learning engages empathic processes. Further supporting this interpretation, an individualized model parameter that indexed sensitivity to others' punishments was inversely associated with trait antisociality. Modeled sensitivity to others' losses also mapped onto post-task motivation ratings, but was not associated with self-reported trait empathy. This work is the first to apply a social reinforcement learning task that spans affect and action requirement (go/no-go) to measure multiple facets of empathic sensitivity.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00119-4.

Reduced salivary oxytocin after an empathic induction task in Intimate Partner Violence perpetrators: Importance of socio-affective functions and its impact on prosocial behavior

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) has been linked to difficulties in socio-affective functions. Nevertheless, the underlying psychobiological mechanisms that might be responsible for them remain unclear. Oxytocin (OXT) stands out as an important hormone that may favor the salience of social information, due to its relevance in empathy and prosocial behavior. Thus, the study of salivary OXT (sOXT) may provide further information about potential impairments in social cognition in IPV perpetrators. This study analyzed the effects of an empathic induction task, performed through negative emotion-eliciting videos, on endogenous sOXT levels, mood state, and emotional perception in 30 IPV perpetrators compared to 32 controls. Additionally, we explored their performance on prosocial behavior after the empathic induction task, using Hare's donation procedure. Lower sOXT levels were found in IPV perpetrators after the task compared to controls, along with a general decreasing tendency in their sOXT levels. Additionally, IPV perpetrators exhibited no change in their mood state and perceived others' emotions as more positive and less intense. Moreover, the mood state response and alexithymia traits, respectively, positively and negatively predicted the sOXT levels after the empathic induction task in the entire sample. Finally, we did not observe a lower appearance of prosocial behaviors in IPV perpetrators; however, higher sOXT levels after the empathic induction task were found in subjects who donated when considering the whole sample. In sum, IPV perpetrators exhibited differences in their sOXT levels when empathizing, compared to controls, with alexithymia and the emotional response potentially explaining the sOXT levels after the task. Furthermore, prosocial behavior was more related to these sOXT levels than to IPV. As our knowledge about the emotional processing of IPV perpetrators increases, we will be better able to develop and include coadjutant treatments in current psychotherapeutic programs, in order to focus on their emotional needs, which, in turn, would reduce the future risk of recidivism.

Associations between vocal emotion recognition and socio-emotional adjustment in children

The human voice is a primary channel for emotional communication. It is often presumed that being able to recognize vocal emotions is important for everyday socio-emotional functioning, but evidence for this assumption remains scarce. Here, we examined relationships between vocal emotion recognition and socio-emotional adjustment in children. The sample included 141 6- to 8-year-old children, and the emotion tasks required them to categorize five emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, plus neutrality), as conveyed by two types of vocal emotional cues: speech prosody and non-verbal vocalizations such as laughter. Socio-emotional adjustment was evaluated by the children's teachers using a multidimensional questionnaire of self-regulation and social behaviour. Based on frequentist and Bayesian analyses, we found that, for speech prosody, higher emotion recognition related to better general socio-emotional adjustment. This association remained significant even when the children's cognitive ability, age, sex and parental education were held constant. Follow-up analyses indicated that higher emotional prosody recognition was more robustly related to the socio-emotional dimensions of prosocial behaviour and cognitive and behavioural self-regulation. For emotion recognition in non-verbal vocalizations, no associations with socio-emotional adjustment were found. A similar null result was obtained for an additional task focused on facial emotion recognition. Overall, these results support the close link between children's emotional prosody recognition skills and their everyday social behaviour.

Empathy regulation, prosociality, and moral judgment

In this review, we examine relationships between empathy, prosocial behavior, and moral judgment. We focus on recent evidence for these relationships, with a focus on motivated empathy regulation as an important process that shapes empathic and moral outcomes. In particular, we highlight tradeoffs in contexts that involve competing victims with different needs, such as in large-scale suffering situations and sacrificial moral dilemmas, as well as on effects on punishment and recursive effects of morality on empathy. Our aim is to integrate motivation frameworks in empathy regulation and social cognition with prosocial and moral judgments.

Examining Links Between Infant Parasympathetic Regulation during the Still-Face Paradigm and Later Callous-Unemotional Traits

Although research suggests that callous-unemotional (CU) traits are underpinned by deficits in social affiliation and reduced sensitivity to threat, there has been little investigation of the biophysiological regulatory mechanisms underlying these processes in infancy. The current study uses data from the Durham Child Health and Development Study (DCHD; n = 206) to examine whether and how the combination of infants' behavioral reactivity and levels of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an indicator of parasympathetic nervous system functioning, during the still-face episode of the still-face paradigm at 6 months differentiates risk for CU traits and oppositional defiant behaviors (ODD) at age 3 years, as well as whether these relations vary by children's attachment security. Results indicate that reduced negative affect during the still-face episode at 6 months predicts higher CU traits (B = -0.28, β = -0.27, p = 0.003) and ODD (B = -0.35, β = -0.24, p = 0.007) at 3 years. Results also show that comparatively lower RSA, i.e. engaged parasympathetic system, predicts higher CU traits (B = -0.10, β = -0.34, p = 0.013), but not ODD. Tests of moderation suggest the combination of blunted negative affect but comparatively lower RSA levels during a social stressor constitutes risk for later CU traits for children who are also insecurely attached (simple slope = -0.70, t = 2.88, p = 0.006 at -1 SD). Findings contribute to our understanding of the complex and interactive risk processes which precede the development of CU traits.

Heroic behavior: A review of the literature on high-stakes altruism in the wild

This review compiles and contextualizes the available empirical literature on natural occurrences of high-stakes altruism among nonrelatives, i.e., behaviors often called 'heroic'. Four domains are covered: exceptional bravery and self-sacrifice in war, heroism in civilian life, undirected organ donations, and rescues of persecuted persons during mass violence and genocides. The diversity of strategies used to identify instances of heroic behavior and the multiplicity of data collection methods employed in this relatively sparse literature currently preclude a systematic comparison of results. Therefore, the aim of this overview is to provide an exhaustive point of entry to a fascinating field of research with much untapped potential for testing theories about prosocial behavior.

Synchrony with distress in affective empathy and compassion

Sensitivity to suffering of others is a core factor in social cohesion and evolutionary success. The emergence of such sensitivity may occur via two neuro-functional mechanisms. One is sharing the pain and distress of others, which relies on affective empathy. The other involves a caring concern for others' wellbeing, termed compassion. Both affective empathy and compassion are triggered by cues of pain and distress, exhibited by suffering targets. Yet, the mechanisms underlying distress processing in empathy and compassion are not clear. In the current research, we investigated synchrony with a target's distress, as a putative mechanism for continuous processing of distress cues. Participants viewed a video of a target in distress when given two different instructions: they were asked to continuously rate their distress in the affective empathy condition, or their feelings of care in the compassion condition. We used these dynamic ratings as well as participants' autonomic and facial responses to assess multi-channel synchrony with the target's self-rated distress fluctuations. Dynamic ratings and facial corrugator responses were significantly positively synchronized with the target's distress. For the corrugator responses, synchrony with the target was more pronounced than synchrony with participants' own ratings. Autonomic responses exhibited negative synchrony with the target's distress. Synchrony was higher in the affective empathy than in the compassion condition, across channels. These results point to the key role of subjective and physiological synchrony with the target's distress in empathic sharing of negative experiences. They also highlight the attenuation of embodied resonance with distress in compassionate experiences.

Neonatal DNA methylation and childhood low prosocial behavior: An epigenome-wide association meta-analysis

Low prosocial behavior in childhood has been consistently linked to later psychopathology, with evidence supporting the influence of both genetic and environmental factors on its development. Although neonatal DNA methylation (DNAm) has been found to prospectively associate with a range of psychological traits in childhood, its potential role in prosocial development has yet to be investigated. This study investigated prospective associations between cord blood DNAm at birth and low prosocial behavior within and across four longitudinal birth cohorts from the Pregnancy And Childhood Epigenetics (PACE) Consortium. We examined (a) developmental trajectories of "chronic-low" versus "typical" prosocial behavior across childhood in a case-control design (N = 2,095), and (b) continuous "low prosocial" scores at comparable cross-cohort time-points (N = 2,121). Meta-analyses were performed to examine differentially methylated positions and regions. At the cohort-specific level, three CpGs were found to associate with chronic low prosocial behavior; however, none of these associations was replicated in another cohort. Meta-analysis revealed no epigenome-wide significant CpGs or regions. Overall, we found no evidence for associations between DNAm patterns at birth and low prosocial behavior across childhood. Findings highlight the importance of employing multi-cohort approaches to replicate epigenetic associations and reduce the risk of false positive discoveries.

Fearlessness and low social affiliation as unique developmental precursors of callous-unemotional behaviors in preschoolers

BACKGROUND

Early callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors identify children at risk for severe and persistent aggression and antisocial behavior. Recent work suggests that fearlessness and low social affiliation are implicated in the etiology of CU behaviors, although more research is needed to clarify these etiological pathways, as well as the role of parenting.

METHOD

Using a sample of preschoolers (N = 620), we examined pathways between observed fear in response to social and non-social stimuli and observed social affiliation during social interactions at age 3 and increases child CU behaviors and oppositional-defiant behaviors from ages 3 to 5. To elucidate the role of parenting in exacerbating or buffering the relationships between low fear and social affiliation and CU behaviors, we tested whether parental harshness or low warmth moderated these pathways.

RESULTS

Fearlessness and low social affiliation uniquely predicted increases in CU behaviors, but not oppositional-defiant behaviors, from ages 3 to 5. Moreover, there was evidence for differential moderation of the fear pathway by harsh parenting, such that harsh parenting predicted increases in CU behaviors in fearless children but increases in oppositional-defiant behaviors in fearful children.

CONCLUSIONS

Fearlessness and low social affiliation contribute to the development of CU behaviors. Harsh parenting can exacerbate the risky fearlessness pathway. Preventative interventions aimed at reducing risk for CU behaviors and persistent aggression and antisocial behavior should target socioaffiliative processes and provide parents with strategies and training to manage and scaffold rule-compliant behavior when children show low fearful arousal.

Creating a Compassionate World: Addressing the Conflicts Between Sharing and Caring Versus Controlling and Holding Evolved Strategies

For thousands of years, various spiritual traditions and social activists have appealed to humans to adopt compassionate ways of living to address the suffering of life. Yet, along with our potential for compassion and self-sacrifice, the last few thousand years of wars, slavery, tortures, and holocausts have shown humans can be extraordinarily selfish, callous, vicious, and cruel. While there has been considerable engagement with these issues, particularly in the area of moral psychology and ethics, this paper explores an evolutionary analysis relating to evolved resource-regulation strategies that can be called "care and share" versus "control and hold." Control and hold are typical of primates that operate through intimidatory social hierarchies. Care and share are less common in non-human primates, but evolved radically in humans during our hunter-gatherer stage when our ancestors lived in relatively interdependent, small, mobile groups. In these groups, individualistic, self-focus, and self-promoting control and hold strategies (trying to secure and accumulate more than others) were shunned and shamed. These caring and sharing hunter-gatherer lifestyles also created the social contexts for the evolution of new forms of childcare and complex human competencies for language, reasoning, planning, empathy, and self-awareness. As a result of our new 'intelligence', our ancestors developed agriculture that reduced mobility, increased group size, resource availability and storage, and resource competition. These re-introduced competing for, rather than sharing of, resources and advantaged those who now pursue (often aggressively) control and hold strategies. Many of our most typical forms of oppressive and anti-compassionate behavior are the result of these strategies. Rather than (just) thinking about individuals competing with one another, we can also consider these different resource regulation strategies as competing within populations shaping psychophysiological patterns; both wealth and poverty change the brain. One of the challenges to creating a more compassionate society is to find ways to create the social and economic conditions that regulate control and hold strategies and promote care and share. No easy task.

Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Ecological Changes, Social Behaviour and Human Intergroup Tolerance 300,000 to 30,000 BP

Archaeological evidence suggests that important shifts were taking place in the character of human social behaviours 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. New artefact types appear and are disseminated with greater frequency. Transfers of both raw materials and finished artefacts take place over increasing distances, implying larger scales of regional mobility and more frequent and friendlier interactions between different communities. Whilst these changes occur during a period of increasing environmental variability, the relationship between ecological changes and transformations in social behaviours is elusive. Here, we explore a possible theoretical approach and methodology for understanding how ecological contexts can influence selection pressures acting on intergroup social behaviours. We focus on the relative advantages and disadvantages of intergroup tolerance in different ecological contexts using agent-based modelling (ABM). We assess the relative costs and benefits of different 'tolerance' levels in between-group interactions on survival and resource exploitation in different environments. The results enable us to infer a potential relationship between ecological changes and proposed changes in between-group behavioural dynamics. We conclude that increasingly harsh environments may have driven changes in hormonal and emotional responses in humans leading to increasing intergroup tolerance, i.e. transformations in social behaviour associated with 'self-domestication'. We argue that changes in intergroup tolerance is a more parsimonious explanation for the emergence of what has been seen as 'modern human behaviour' than changes in hard aspects of cognition or other factors such as cognitive adaptability or population size.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10816-020-09503-5.

Compassion: From Its Evolution to a Psychotherapy

The concept, benefits and recommendations for the cultivation of compassion have been recognized in the contemplative traditions for thousands of years. In the last 30 years or so, the study of compassion has revealed it to have major physiological and psychological effects influencing well-being, addressing mental health difficulties, and promoting prosocial behavior. This paper outlines an evolution informed biopsychosocial, multicomponent model to caring behavior and its derivative "compassion" that underpins newer approaches to psychotherapy. The paper explores the origins of caring motives and the nature and biopsychosocial functions of caring-attachment behavior. These include providing a secure base (sources of protection, validation, encouragement and guidance) and safe haven (source of soothing and comfort) for offspring along with physiological regulating functions, which are also central for compassion focused therapy. Second, it suggests that it is the way recent human cognitive competencies give rise to different types of "mind awareness" and "knowing intentionality" that transform basic caring motives into potentials for compassion. While we can care for our gardens and treasured objects, the concept of compassion is only used for sentient beings who can "suffer." As psychotherapy addresses mental suffering, cultivating the motives and competencies of compassion to self and others can be a central focus for psychotherapy.

Ways of Knowing Compassion: How Do We Come to Know, Understand, and Measure Compassion When We See It?

Over the last decade, empirical research on compassion has burgeoned in the biomedical, clinical, translational, and foundational sciences. Increasingly sophisticated understandings and measures of compassion continue to emerge from the abundance of multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies. Naturally, the diversity of research methods and theoretical frameworks employed presents a significant challenge to consensus and synthesis of this knowledge. To bring the empirical findings of separate and sometimes siloed disciplines into conversation with one another requires an examination of their disparate assumptions about what compassion is and how it can be known. Here, we present an integrated theoretical review of methodologies used in the empirical study of compassion. Our goal is to highlight the distinguishing features of each of these ways of knowing compassion, as well as the strengths and limitations of applying them to specific research questions. We hope this will provide useful tools for selecting methods that are tailored to explicit objectives (methods matching), taking advantage of methodological complementarity across disciplines (methods mixing), and incorporating the empirical study of compassion into fields in which it may be missing.

Reduced Multivoxel Pattern Similarity of Vicarious Neural Pain Responses in Psychopathy

Psychopathy is a personality construct characterized by interpersonal callousness, boldness, and disinhibition, traits that vary continuously across the population and are linked to impaired empathic responding to others' distress and suffering. Following suggestions that empathy reflects neural self-other mapping-for example, the similarity of neural responses to experienced and observed pain, measurable at the voxel level-we used a multivoxel approach to assess associations between psychopathy and empathic neural responses to pain. During fMRI scanning, 21 community-recruited participants varying in psychopathy experienced painful pressure stimulation and watched a live video of a stranger undergoing the same stimulation. As total psychopathy, coldheartedness, and self-centered impulsivity increased, multivoxel similarity of vicarious and experienced pain in the left anterior insula decreased, effects that were not observed following an empathy prompt. Our data provide preliminary evidence that psychopathy is characterized by disrupted spontaneous empathic representations of others' pain that may be reduced by instructions to empathize.

Sustainable Compassion Training: Integrating Meditation Theory With Psychological Science

Meditation programs continue to proliferate in the modern world, with increasing participation from scientists and many others who seek to improve physical, mental, relational, and social flourishing. In developing such programs, the meditation practices have been adapted to meet the needs of modern cultures. However, through that adaptation, important contextual factors of traditional contemplative cultures are often dropped or forgotten. This article presents a system of compassion and mindfulness training, Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT), which is designed to help people cultivate increasingly unconditional, inclusive, and sustainable care for self and others. SCT aims to recover important contextual factors of meditation that flexibly meet the diverse needs of modern secular and religious participants. SCT draws on Tibetan Buddhism in dialogue with caregivers, other contemplative traditions and relevant scientific theories to inform meditative transformation for secular contexts. We provide an overview of SCT meditations that includes both contemplative and scientific theories that draw out important features of them. Each meditation includes novel hypotheses that are generated from this dialogical process. We also provide links to audio-guided meditations.

Help or flight? Increased threat imminence promotes defensive helping in humans

In humans and other mammals, defensive responses to danger vary with threat imminence, but it is unknown how those responses affect decisions to help conspecifics. Here, we manipulated threat imminence to investigate the impact of different defensive states on human helping behaviour. Ninety-eight healthy adult participants made trial-by-trial decisions about whether to help a co-participant avoid an aversive shock, at the risk of receiving a shock themselves. Helping decisions were prompted under imminent or distal threat, based on temporal distance to the moment of shock administration to the co-participant. Results showed that, regardless of how likely participants were to also receive a shock, they helped the co-participant more under imminent than distal threat. Reaction times and cardiac changes during the task supported the efficacy of the threat imminence manipulation in eliciting dissociable defensive states, with faster responses and increased heart rate during imminent compared to distal threats. Individual differences in empathic concern were specifically correlated with helping during imminent threats. These results suggest that defensive states driving active escape from immediate danger may also facilitate decisions to help others, potentially by engaging neurocognitive systems implicated in caregiving across mammals.

Assessing the validity of the Self versus other interest implicit association test

There is great variability in the ways that humans treat one another, ranging from extreme compassion (e.g., philanthropy, organ donation) to self-interested cruelty (e.g., theft, murder). What underlies and explains this variability? Past research has primarily examined human prosociality using explicit self-report scales, which are susceptible to self-presentation biases. However, these concerns can be alleviated with the use of implicit attitude tests that assess automatic associations. Here, we introduce and assess the validity of a new test of implicit prosociality-the Self versus Other Interest Implicit Association Test (SOI-IAT)-administered to two samples in pre-registered studies: regular blood donors (Study 1; N = 153) and a nationally representative sample of Americans (Study 2; N = 467). To assess validity, we investigated whether SOI-IAT scores were correlated with explicit measures of prosociality within each sample and compared SOI-IAT scores of the control sample (representative sample of Americans) with the prosocial sample (blood donors). While SOI-IAT scores were higher in the prosocial blood donor sample, SOI-IAT scores were generally uncorrelated with explicit measures and actual prosocial behaviour. Thus, the SOI-IAT may be able to detect group differences in everyday prosociality, but future testing is needed for a more robust validation of the SOI-IAT. These unexpected findings underscore the importance of sharing null and mixed results to fill gaps in the scientific record and highlight the challenges of conducting research on implicit processes.

Marmoset prosociality is intentional

Marmoset monkeys show high levels of proactive prosociality, a trait shared with humans, presumably because both species rely on allomaternal care. However, it is not clear whether the proximate regulation of this convergent trait is also similar, in particular with regard to intentionality, which is a defining characteristic of prosocial behavior in the human literature. The aim of this paper was to investigate whether marmoset monkeys' prosociality fulfils the criteria of intentionality developed in primate communication research. The results show that marmoset prosocial behavior (i) has some degree of flexibility, since individuals can use multiple means to reach their goal and adjust them to specific conditions, (ii) depends on the presence of an audience, i.e. potential recipients (social use), and (iii) is goal-directed, because (a) it continues exactly until the putative goal is reached, and (b) individuals check back and look at/for their partner when their prosocial actions do not achieve the putative goal (i.e. if their actions don't lead to the expected outcome, this elicits distinct reactions in the actor). These results suggest that marmoset prosociality is under some degree of voluntary, intentional control. They are in line with other findings that marmosets perceive each other as intentional agents, and only learn socially from actions that are perceived as intentional. The most parsimonious conclusion is, therefore, that prosocial behavior is fundamentally under voluntary control in marmosets, just as it is in humans, even though our more sophisticated cognitive abilities allow for a far more complex integration of prosociality into a broader variety of contexts and of behavioral goals.

The gender gap in commenting: Women are less likely than men to comment on (men's) published research

Subtle gender dynamics in the publishing process involving collaboration, peer-review, readership, citation, and media coverage disadvantage women in academia. In this study we consider whether commenting on published work is also gendered. Using all the comments published over a 16-year period in PNAS (N = 869) and Science (N = 481), we find that there is a gender gap in the authorship of comment letters: women are less likely than men to comment on published academic research. This disparity is greater than gender differences in the publication of research articles. There is also a gendered pattern in commenting: women comment writers are relatively less likely to engage with men's research. If left unaddressed, these patterns in academic commenting could impede scholarly exchange between men and women and further marginalize women within the scientific community.

How Do Stress and Social Closeness Impact Prosocial Behavior?

Abstract. Factors such as time pressure and psychosocial stress may increase or decrease prosocial behavior depending on a number of factors. One factor that consistently positively impacts prosocial behavior is relationship status: Prosocial behavior is more likely toward kin than toward strangers. The interactions among stress, kin relationships, and prosocial behavior were examined in two separate experiments. In Study 1, 79 university students were asked to decide how much money to donate to family members, friends, or strangers, either under time pressure or with no time constraints. Participants donated more to close kin and friends than to strangers, but time pressure did not increase prosocial behavior. In Study 2, 94 university students completed the Trier Social Stress Test for Groups (TSST-G) or a control task, followed by a similar donation task as used in Study 1. Participants donated more to close kin and friends than to strangers, but stress did not influence donation amounts. These results do not support the hypothesis that stress due to time pressure or psychosocial factors increases prosocial behavior.

Activation in bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) corresponds to everyday helping

Everyday prosociality includes helping behaviors such as holding doors or giving directions that are spontaneous and low-cost and are performed frequently by the average person. Such behaviors promote a wide array of positive outcomes that include increased well-being, trust, and social capital, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support these behaviors are not yet well understood. Whereas costly altruistic responding to others' distress is associated with elevated reactivity in the amygdala, we hypothesized that everyday prosociality would be more closely associated with activation in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), a region of the extended amygdala known for its roles in maintaining vigilance for relevant socio-affective environmental cues and in supporting parental care. One previous study of the neural correlates of everyday prosociality highlighted a functional cluster identified as the septal area but which overlapped with established coordinates of BNST. We used an anatomical mask of BNST (Torrisi et al., 2015) to evaluate the association of BNST activation and daily helping in a sample of 25 adults recruited from the community as well as 23 adults who had engaged in acts of extraordinary altruism. Results found that activation in left BNST during an empathy task predicted everyday helping over a subsequent 14-day period in both samples. BNST activation most strongly predicted helping strangers and proactive helping. We conclude that beyond facilitating care for offspring, activation in BNST may provide a basis for the motivation to engage in a broad array of everyday helping behaviors.

I8-arachnotocin-an arthropod-derived G protein-biased ligand of the human vasopressin V2 receptor

The neuropeptides oxytocin (OT) and vasopressin (VP) and their G protein-coupled receptors OTR, V_1aR, V_1bR, and V₂R form an important and widely-distributed neuroendocrine signaling system. In mammals, this signaling system regulates water homeostasis, blood pressure, reproduction, as well as social behaviors such as pair bonding, trust and aggression. There exists high demand for ligands with differing pharmacological profiles to study the physiological and pathological functions of the individual receptor subtypes. Here, we present the pharmacological characterization of an arthropod (Metaseiulus occidentalis) OT/VP-like nonapeptide across the human OT/VP receptors. I8-arachnotocin is a full agonist with respect to second messenger signaling at human V₂R (EC₅₀ 34 nM) and V_1bR (EC₅₀ 1.2 µM), a partial agonist at OTR (EC₅₀ 790 nM), and a competitive antagonist at V_1aR [pA₂ 6.25 (558 nM)]. Intriguingly, I8-arachnotocin activated the Gα_s pathway of V₂R without recruiting either β-arrestin-1 or β-arrestin-2. I8-arachnotocin might thus be a novel pharmacological tool to study the (patho)physiological relevance of β-arrestin-1 or -2 recruitment to the V₂R. These findings furthermore highlight arthropods as a novel, vast and untapped source for the discovery of novel pharmacological probes and potential drug leads targeting neurohormone receptors.

Is Empathy the Default Response to Suffering? A Meta-Analytic Evaluation of Perspective Taking’s Effect on Empathic Concern

We conducted a series of meta-analytic tests on experiments in which participants read perspective-taking instructions—that is, written instructions to imagine a distressed persons’ point of view (“imagine-self” and “imagine-other” instructions), or to inhibit such actions (“remain-objective” instructions)—and afterwards reported how much empathic concern they experienced upon learning about the distressed person. If people spontaneously empathize with others, then participants who receive remain-objective instructions should report less empathic concern than do participants in a “no-instructions” control condition; if people can deliberately increase how much empathic concern they experience, then imagine-self and imagine-other instructions should increase empathic concern relative to not receiving any instructions. Random-effects models revealed that remain-objective instructions reduced empathic concern, but “imagine” instructions did not significantly increase it. The results were robust to most corrections for bias. Our conclusions were not qualified by the study characteristics we examined, but most relevant moderators have not yet been thoroughly studied.

The neurophysiological basis of compassion: An fMRI meta-analysis of compassion and its related neural processes

Theoretical and neurophysiological investigations into compassion are burgeoning, yet the putative neural mechanisms which underpin such processes are less well understood. Therefore, we have conducted an Activation-Likelihood Estimate meta-analysis in order to ascertain the shared neural processes consistently identified as relevant to compassion. Our analysis of sixteen fMRI studies revealed activation across seven broad regions, with the largest peaks localized to the Periaqueductal Grey, Anterior Insula, Anterior Cingulate, and Inferior Frontal Gyrus. Overall, we identified a tendency for studies to operationalize compassion in one of three ways, as driven either 'top-down', 'bottom-up', or modified by target context. We failed to identify regions purportedly common to compassion such as the DLPFC, OFC, and Amygdala, possibly due to a small number of studies which used Loving-Kindness meditation. We argue future research in compassion science continue a multi-modal approach to examine links between neural activity and actual prosocial behavior, and recommend the application of fMRI paradigms on compassion with clinically diagnosed populations to parallel current trends in psychotherapy such as Compassion Focused Therapy.

The Sensitivity to Threat and Affiliative Reward (STAR) model and the development of callous-unemotional traits

Research implicates callous-unemotional (CU) traits (i.e., lack of empathy, prosociality, and guilt, and reduced sensitivity to others' emotions) in the development of severe and persistent antisocial behavior. To improve etiological models of antisocial behavior and develop more effective treatments, we need a better understanding of the origins of CU traits. In this review, we discuss the role of two psychobiological and mechanistic precursors to CU traits: low affiliative reward (i.e., deficits in seeking out or getting pleasure from social bonding and closeness with others) and low threat sensitivity (i.e., fearlessness to social and non-social threat). We outline the Sensitivity to Threat and Affiliative Reward (STAR) model and review studies that have examined the development of affiliative reward and threat sensitivity across animal, neuroimaging, genetic, and behavioral perspectives. We next evaluate evidence for the STAR model, specifically the claim that CU traits result from deficits in both affiliative reward and threat sensitivity. We end with constructive suggestions for future research to test the hypotheses generated by the STAR model.

Insular Cortex Projections to Nucleus Accumbens Core Mediate Social Approach to Stressed Juvenile Rats

Social interactions are shaped by features of the interactants, including age, emotion, sex, and familiarity. Age-specific responses to social affect are evident when an adult male rat is presented with a pair of unfamiliar male conspecifics, one of which is stressed via two foot shocks and the other naive to treatment. Adult test rats prefer to interact with stressed juvenile (postnatal day 30, PN30) conspecifics but avoid stressed adult (PN50) conspecifics. This pattern depends upon the insular cortex (IC), which is anatomically connected to the nucleus accumbens core (NAc). The goal of this work was to test the necessity of IC projections to NAc during social affective behavior. Here, bilateral pharmacological inhibition of the NAc with tetrodotoxin (1 μm; 0.5 μl/side) abolished the preference for stressed PN30, but did not alter interactions with PN50 conspecifics. Using a combination of retrograding tracing and c-Fos immunohistochemistry, we report that social interactions with stressed PN30 conspecifics elicit greater Fos immunoreactivity in IC → NAc neurons than interactions with naive PN30 conspecifics. Chemogenetic stimulation of IC terminals in the NAc increased social exploration with juvenile, but not adult, conspecifics, whereas chemogenetic inhibition of this tract blocked the preference to investigate stressed PN30 conspecifics, which expands upon our previous finding that optogenetic inhibition of IC projection neurons mediated approach and avoidance. These new findings suggest that outputs of IC to the NAc modulate social approach, which provides new insight to the neural circuitry underlying social decision-making.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Social decision-making underlies an animal's behavioral response to others in a range of social contexts. Previous findings indicate the insular cortex (IC) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc) play important roles in social behaviors, and human neuroimaging implicates both IC and NAc in autism and other psychiatric disorders characterized by aberrant social cognition. To test whether IC projections to the NAc are involved in social decision-making, circuit-specific chemogenetic manipulations demonstrated that the IC → NAc pathway mediates social approach toward distressed juvenile, but not adult, conspecifics. This finding is the first to implicate this circuit in rodent socioemotional behaviors and may be a neuroanatomical substrate for integration of emotion with social reward.

Unraveling the role of oxytocin in the motivational structure of conflict

Current psychological perspectives emphasize “attack” and “defense” as the behavioral mechanisms underlying conflict. Here, we extend this view by highlighting the relevance of pathological altruism and the neuroendocrine pathways associated with hostile behaviors. Specifically, we elucidate the modulatory role of the neuropeptide hormone oxytocin in motivating extraordinary levels of in-group commitment that can promote extreme behaviors and endure conflict with out-groups.

An insular view of the social decision-making network

Social animals must detect, evaluate and respond to the emotional states of other individuals in their group. A constellation of gestures, vocalizations, and chemosignals enable animals to convey affect and arousal to others in nuanced, multisensory ways. Observers integrate social information with environmental and internal factors to select behavioral responses to others via a process call social decision-making. The Social Decision Making Network (SDMN) is a system of brain structures and neurochemicals that are conserved across species (mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds) that are the proximal mediators of most social behaviors. However, how sensory information reaches the SDMN to shape behavioral responses during a social encounter is not well known. Here we review the empirical data that demonstrate the necessity of sensory systems in detecting social stimuli, as well as the anatomical connectivity of sensory systems with each node of the SDMN. We conclude that the insular cortex is positioned to link integrated social sensory cues to this network to produce flexible and appropriate behavioral responses to socioemotional cues.

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

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.

Computing Social Value Conversion in the Human Brain

Social signals play powerful roles in shaping self-oriented reward valuation and decision making. These signals activate social and valuation/decision areas, but the core computation for their integration into the self-oriented decision machinery remains unclear. Here, we study how a fundamental social signal, social value (others' reward value), is converted into self-oriented decision making in the human brain. Using behavioral analysis, modeling, and neuroimaging, we show three-stage processing of social value conversion from the offer to the effective value and then to the final decision value. First, a value of others' bonus on offer, called offered value, was encoded uniquely in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) and also in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (ldlPFC), which is commonly activated by offered self-bonus value. The effective value, an intermediate value representing the effective influence of the offer on the decision, was represented in the right anterior insula (rAI), and the final decision value was encoded in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Second, using psychophysiological interaction and dynamic causal modeling analyses, we demonstrated three-stage feedforward processing from the rTPJ and ldPFC to the rAI and then from rAI to the mPFC. Further, we showed that these characteristics of social conversion underlie distinct sociobehavioral phenotypes. We demonstrate that the variability in the conversion underlies the difference between prosocial and selfish subjects, as seen from the differential strength of the rAI and ldlPFC coupling to the mPFC responses, respectively. Together, these findings identified fundamental neural computation processes for social value conversion underlying complex social decision making behaviors.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT In daily life, we make decisions based on self-interest, but also in consideration for others' status. These social influences modulate valuation and decision signals in the brain, suggesting a fundamental process called value conversion that translates social information into self-referenced decisions. However, little is known about the conversion process and its underlying brain mechanisms. We investigated value conversion using human fMRI with computational modeling and found three essential stages in a progressive brain circuit from social to empathic and decision areas. Interestingly, the brain mechanism of conversion differed between prosocial and individualistic subjects. These findings reveal how the brain processes and merges social information into the elemental flow of self-interested decision making.