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Conflict is a ubiquitous feature of interpersonal relationships, yet many of these relationships preserve their value following conflict. Our ability to refrain from punishment despite the occurrence of conflict is a characteristic of human beings. Using a combination of behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, we show that prosocial decision-making is modulated by relationship closeness. In an iterated social exchange, participants were more likely to cooperate with their partner compared to an unknown person by accepting unfair exchanges. Importantly, this effect was not influenced by how resources were actually being shared with one’s partner. The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) was activated when the partner, rather than the unknown person, behaved unfairly and, in the same context, the MPFC demonstrated greater functional connectivity with the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (DACC). MPFC–DACC connectivity was inversely associated with participants’ tendency to “forgive” their partner for unfairness as well as performance outside the scanner on a behavioral measure of forgiveness. We conclude that relationship closeness modulates a neural network comprising the MPFC/DACC during economic exchanges.
Moral decision-making is central to everyday social life because the evaluation of the actions of another agent or our own actions made with respect to the norms and values guides our behavior in a community. There is previous evidence that the presence of bodily harm-even if irrelevant for a decision-may affect the decision-making, process. While recent neuroimaging studies found a common neural substrate of moral decision-making, the role of bodily harm has not been systematically studied so far. Here we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how behavioral and neural correlates of semantic and moral decision-making processes are modulated by the presence of direct bodily harm or violence in the stimuli. Twelve participants made moral and semantic decisions about sentences describing actions of agents that either contained bodily harm or not and that could easily be judged as being good or bad or correct/incorrect, respectively. During moral and semantic decision-making, the presence of bodily harm resulted in faster response times (RT) and weaker activity in the temporal poles relative to trials devoid of bodily harm/violence, indicating a processing advantage and reduced processing depth for violence-related linguistic stimuli. Notably, there was no increase in activity in the amygdala and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) in response to trials containing bodily harm. These findings might be a correlate of limited generation of the semantic and emotional context in the anterior temporal poles during the evaluation of actions of another agent related to violence that is made with respect to the norms and values guiding our behavior in a community. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
Neuropsychological lesion studies evidence the necessity to differentiate between various forms of tool-related actions such as real tool use, tool use demonstration with tool in hand and without physical target object, and pantomime without tool in hand. However, thus far, neuroimaging studies have primarily focused only on investigating tool use pantomimes. The present fMRI study investigates pantomime without tool in hand as compared to tool use demonstration with tool in hand in order to explore patterns of cerebral signal modulation associated with acting with imaginary tools in hand.
Fifteen participants performed with either hand (i) tool use pantomime with an imaginary tool in hand in response to visual tool presentation and (ii) tool use demonstration with tool in hand in response to visual-tactile tool presentation. In both conditions, no physical target object was present. The conjunction analysis of the right and left hands executions of tool use pantomime relative to tool use demonstration yielded significant activity in the left middle and superior temporal lobe. In contrast, demonstration relative to pantomime revealed large bihemispherically distributed homologous areas of activity.
Thus far, fMRI studies have demonstrated the relevance of the left middle and superior temporal gyri in viewing, naming, and matching tools and related actions and contexts. Since in our study all these factors were equally (ir)relevant both in the tool use pantomime and the tool use demonstration conditions, the present findings enhance the knowledge about the function of these brain regions in tool-related cognitive processes. The two contrasted conditions only differ regarding the fact that the pantomime condition requires the individual to act with an imaginary tool in hand. Therefore, we suggest that the left middle and superior temporal gyri are specifically involved in integrating the projected mental image of a tool in the execution of a tool-specific movement concept. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The flexible learning of stimulus-reward associations when required by situational context is essential for everyday behavior. Older adults experience a progressive decline in several cognitive functions and show deficiencies in neuropsychological tasks requiring flexible adaptation to external feedback, which could be related to impairments in reward association learning. To study the effect of aging on stimulus-reward association learning 20 young and 20 older adults performed a probabilistic object reversal task (pORT) along with a battery of tests assessing executive functions and general intellectual abilities. The pORT requires learning and reversing associations between actions and their outcomes. Older participants collected fewer points, needed more trials to reach the learning criterion, and completed less blocks successfully compared to young adults. This difference remained statistically significant after correcting for the age effect of other tests assessing executive functions. This suggests that there is an age-related difference in reward association learning as measured using the pORT, which is not closely related to other executive functions with respect to the age effect. In human aging, structural alterations of reward detecting structures and functional changes of the dopaminergic as well as the serotonergic system might contribute to the deficit in reward association learning observed in this study. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
People differ with regard to how they perceive, experience, and express negative affect. While trait negative affect reflects a stable, sustained personality trait, state negative affect represents a stimulus limited and temporally acute emotion. So far, little is known about the neural systems mediating the relationship between negative affect and acute emotion processing. To address this issue we investigated in a healthy female sample how individual differences in state negative affect are reflected in changes in blood oxygen level-dependent responses during passive viewing of emotional stimuli. To assess autonomic arousal we simultaneously recorded changes in skin conductance level. At the psychophysiological level we found increased skin conductance level in response to aversive relative to neutral pictures. However, there was no association of state negative affect with skin conductance level. At the neural level we found that high state negative affect was associated with increased left insular activity during passive viewing of aversive stimuli. The insula has been implicated in interoceptive processes and in the integration of sensory, visceral, and affective information thus contributing to subjective emotional experience. Greater recruitment of the insula in response to aversive relative to neutral stimuli in subjects with high state negative affect may represent increased processing of salient aversive stimuli.
Multitalker situations confront listeners with a plethora of competing auditory inputs, and hence require selective attention to relevant information, especially when the perceptual saliency of distracting inputs is high. This study augmented the classical forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm by adding an interaural intensity manipulation to investigate developmental differences in the interplay between perceptual saliency and attentional control during auditory processing between early and middle childhood. We found that older children were able to flexibly focus on instructed auditory inputs from either the right or the left ear, overcoming the effects of perceptual saliency. In contrast, younger children implemented their attentional focus less efficiently. Direct comparisons of the present data with data from a recently published study of younger and older adults from our group suggest that younger children and older adults show similar levels of performance. Critically, follow-up comparisons revealed that younger children's performance restrictions reflect difficulties in attentional control only, whereas older adults' performance deficits also reflect an exaggerated reliance on perceptual saliency. We conclude that auditory attentional control improves considerably from middle to late childhood and that auditory attention deficits in healthy aging cannot be reduced to a simple reversal of child developmental improvements.