Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Neuroscience Sector, Trieste, Italy; Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Bologna, Italy.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Jul 31;116(Pt A):34-43. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.02.015. Epub 2017 Feb 22.
Costly altruism entails helping others at a cost to the self and prior work shows that empathic concern (EC) for the well-being of distressed and vulnerable individuals is one of the primary motivators of such behavior. However, extant work has investigated costly altruism with paradigms that did not feature self-relevant and severe costs for the altruist and have solely focused on neurofunctional, and not neuroanatomical, correlates. In the current study, we used a contextually-rich virtual reality environment to study costly altruism and found that individuals who risked their own lives in the virtual world to try to save someone in danger had enlarged right anterior insula and exhibited greater empathic concern than those who did not. These findings add to the growing literature showing the role of caring motivation in promoting altruism and prosociality and its neural correlates in the right anterior insula.
代价高昂的利他主义意味着要以自我为代价去帮助他人，先前的研究表明，对困境中弱势个体的同理心关怀（EC）是这种行为的主要动机之一。然而，现有的研究都是用利他主义者没有自身相关和严重代价的范式来研究代价高昂的利他主义，并且只关注神经功能，而不是神经解剖学的相关性。在本研究中，我们使用了一个内容丰富的虚拟现实环境来研究代价高昂的利他主义，发现那些在虚拟世界中冒着生命危险去救处于危险中的人的个体，他们的右前岛叶会扩大，表现出比不救人的个体更大的同理心关怀。这些发现增加了越来越多的文献，表明关怀动机在促进利他主义和亲社会行为中的作用及其在右前岛叶的神经相关性。
