Win for your kin: Neural responses to personal and vicarious rewards when mothers win for their adolescent children

Connected in Bad Times and in Good Times: Empathy Induces Stable Social Closeness

Humans need social closeness to prosper. There is evidence that empathy can induce social closeness. However, it remains unclear how empathy-related social closeness is formed and how stable it is as time passes. We applied an acquisition-extinction paradigm combined with computational modeling and fMRI, to investigate the formation and stability of empathy-related social closeness. Female participants observed painful stimulation of another person with high probability (acquisition) and low probability (extinction) and rated their closeness to that person. The results of two independent studies showed increased social closeness in the acquisition block that resisted extinction in the extinction block. Providing insights into underlying mechanisms, reinforcement learning modeling revealed that the formation of social closeness is based on a learning signal (prediction error) generated from observing another's pain, whereas maintaining social closeness is based on a learning signal generated from observing another's pain relief. The results of a reciprocity control study indicate that this feedback recalibration is specific to learning of empathy-related social closeness. On the neural level, the recalibration of the feedback signal was associated with neural responses in anterior insula and adjacent inferior frontal gyrus and the bilateral superior temporal sulcus/temporoparietal junction. Together, these findings show that empathy-related social closeness generated in bad times, that is, empathy with the misfortune of another person, transfers to good times and thus may form one important basis for stable social relationships.

Mothers exhibit higher neural activity in gaining rewards for their children than for themselves

Are people willing to exert greater effort to obtain rewards for their children than they are for themselves? Although previous studies have demonstrated that social distance influences neural responses to altruistic reward processing, the distinction between winning rewards for oneself and winning them for one's child is unclear. In the present study, a group of 31 mothers performed a monetary incentive delay task in which cue-induced reward anticipations of winning a reward for themselves, their children and donation to a charity program were manipulated trial-wise, followed by performance-contingent feedback. Behaviorally, the anticipation of winning a reward for their children accelerated participants' responses. Importantly, the electroencephalogram results revealed that across the reward anticipation and consumption phases, the child condition elicited comparable or higher brain responses of participants than the self condition did. The source localization results showed that participants' reward anticipations for their children were associated with more activation in the social brain regions, compared to winning a reward for themselves or a charity donation. Overall, these findings advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms of altruistic reward processing and suggest that the priority of winning a reward for one's child may transcend the limits of the self-advantage effect in reward processing.

Giving to others and neural processing during adolescence

Adolescence is marked by an increased sensitivity to the social environment as youth navigate evolving relationships with family, friends, and communities. Prosocial behavior becomes more differentiated such that older adolescents increasingly give more to known others (e.g., family, friends) than to strangers. This differentiation may be linked with changes in neural processing among brain regions implicated in social decision-making. A total of 269 adolescents from 9–15 and 19–20 years of age completed a decision-making task in which they could give money to caregivers, friends, and strangers while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Giving to caregivers and friends (at a cost to oneself) increased with age, but giving to strangers remained lower and stable across age. Brain regions implicated in cognitive control (dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) showed increased blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activation with increasing age across giving decisions to all recipients; regions associated with reward processing (ventral striatum and ventral tegmental area) showed increased activation across all ages when giving to all recipients. Brain regions associated with social cognition were either not active (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) or showed reduced activation (temporal parietal junction and posterior superior temporal sulcus) when giving to others across all ages. Findings have implications for understanding the role of brain development in the increased complexity of social decision-making during adolescence.

Vicarious praise and pain: parental neural responses to social feedback about their adolescent child

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.

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

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.

Friendship stability in adolescence is associated with ventral striatum responses to vicarious rewards

An important task for adolescents is to form and maintain friendships. In this three-wave biannual study, we used a longitudinal neuroscience perspective to examine the dynamics of friendship stability. Relative to childhood and adulthood, adolescence is marked by elevated ventral striatum activity when gaining self-serving rewards. Using a sample of participants between the ages of eight and twenty-eight, we tested age-related changes in ventral striatum response to gaining for stable (n = 48) versus unstable best friends (n = 75) (and self). In participants with stable friendships, we observed a quadratic developmental trajectory of ventral striatum responses to winning versus losing rewards for friends, whereas participants with unstable best friends showed no age-related changes. Ventral striatum activity in response to winning versus losing for friends further varied with friendship closeness for participants with unstable friendships. We suggest that these findings may reflect changing social motivations related to formation and maintenance of friendships across adolescence.

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

This study investigated the neural processes underlying vicarious joy and their dependence on emotional closeness. Prior studies revealed that the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) is a target brain region for processing rewards for self, but the neural mechanisms of processing rewards for others are not yet well understood. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm was employed in young adults (N = 30), in combination with a self-report questionnaire on the perceived emotional closeness to the target. We examined the neural correlates of vicarious rewards when winning money for oneself or one of three other targets. To examine family relationships, two of the targets were the mother and father of the participants, and the third target was an unknown stranger. We found an increase in activation in the NAcc when playing for family members compared with a stranger. We further observed a difference in neural activation when winning for the father compared with the mother in an extended network involving the medial prefrontal cortex and precuneus, brain regions involved in mentalizing. These findings were not related to reports of emotional closeness. This new paradigm has considerable value for future research into the fundamental neural processes underlying empathy and vicarious joy.

Self and Others in Adolescence

Research has demonstrated that adolescence is an important time for self- and other-oriented development that underlies many skills vital for becoming a contributing member of society with healthy intergroup relations. It is often assumed that these two processes, thinking about self and thinking about others, are pitted against each other when adolescents engage in social decision making such as giving or sharing. Recent evidence from social neuroscience, however, does not support this notion of conflicting motives, suggesting instead that thinking about self and others relies on a common network of social-affective brain regions, with the medial prefrontal cortex playing a central role in the integration of perspectives related to self and others. Here, we argue that self- and other-oriented thinking are intertwined processes that rely on an overlapping neural network. Adolescents’ motivation to contribute to society can be fostered most when self- and other-oriented motives align.