Deciphering cognitive and affective neural correlates of prosocial decision making in adult development

解读成人发展中亲社会决策的认知和情感神经相关性

• 批准号: 427083324
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Philipp Kanske
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Klinik und Poliklinik für Psychiatrie, Psychosomatik und Psychotherapie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/427083324?language=en
• 关键词: Deciphering; cognitive; affective; neural; correlates

Across cultures, cooperation and prosocial behavior are crucial aspects of human social interaction. The emotional and cognitive capacities enabling prosocial behavior and their neural correlates are relatively well understood. Empathy (i.e. the sharing of others’ affect), compassion (i.e. feelings of care and concern for others) and theory of mind (i.e. the capacity to take others’ perspective) engage separable neural networks, whose activation patterns allow predicting whether a person will decide to help another or not. We know considerably less, however, about how these mechanisms may change across adult development. Self-report and behavioral evidence suggests that there are changes in old age. Theory of mind declines, while empathy and compassion remain stable or even increase in old age, mirroring the trajectories of earlier declining structural integrity in brain regions involved in theory of mind. The evidence on prosocial behavior in old age is largely inconclusive. It is therefore crucial to, in a first step, identify the functional brain changes associated with social affect and cognition. We will achieve this goal by applying a comprehensive, recently validated, naturalistic social task and functional magnetic resonance imaging in a large participant cohort with a wide age range (18-85 years; WP1). Second, to elucidate age-related changes in prosocial behavior, we will employ a standardized social exchange game (modified version of the dictator game) in the same participants, which enables the development of a neuro-computational model of prosocial choice (WP2). Given the diversity in prior results, a modeling approach has the crucial advantage of separating actual generosity from noise in the decision process that seems to increase with age. Lastly, making use of multivariate decoding techniques, we aim to link the two datasets described above to specify the – potentially changing – weights of empathy, compassion and theory of mind in enabling prosocial behavior across adult development (WP3). The proposal synergistically combines our expertise in developmental and social neuroscience and we will jointly train and exchange two young scientists across our laboratories. Our results will expand neuroscientific research on social affect, cognition and behavior to a lifespan perspective, thereby also informing theory-building in developmental psychology.

在不同文化中，合作和亲社会行为是人类社会互动的重要方面。促成亲社会行为的情感和认知能力及其神经相关性已被相对较好地理解。同理心（即分享他人的情感）、同情心（即对他人的关心和关心的感觉）和心理理论（即站在他人的角度思考的能力）涉及可分离的神经网络，其激活模式可以预测一个人是否会决定帮助另一个人。然而，我们对这些机制在成人发育过程中如何变化的了解要少得多。自我报告和行为证据表明老年发生了变化。心智理论衰退，而同理心和同情心在老年时保持稳定甚至增加，这反映了参与心智理论的大脑区域早期结构完整性下降的轨迹。关于老年亲社会行为的证据在很大程度上是不确定的。因此，第一步必须确定与社会情感和认知相关的大脑功能变化。我们将通过在年龄范围广泛（18-85 岁；WP1）的大型参与者队列中应用全面的、最近验证的自然社会任务和功能磁共振成像来实现这一目标。其次，为了阐明亲社会行为与年龄相关的变化，我们将在相同的参与者中采用标准化的社交交换游戏（独裁者游戏的修改版本），这使得能够开发亲社会选择的神经计算模型（WP2）。考虑到先前结果的多样性，建模方法具有至关重要的优势，可以将实际的慷慨与决策过程中的噪音区分开来，而决策过程中的噪音似乎随着年龄的增长而增加。最后，利用多元解码技术，我们的目标是将上述两个数据集联系起来，以指定同理心、同情心和心理理论在成人发展过程中实现亲社会行为的潜在变化权重（WP3）。该提案协同结合了我们在发展和社会神经科学方面的专业知识，我们将在我们的实验室中联合培训和交流两名年轻科学家。我们的研究结果将把社会情感、认知和行为的神经科学研究扩展到生命周期的角度，从而为发展心理学的理论建设提供信息。