Henning Max, Fox Glenn R, Kaplan Jonas, Damasio Hanna, Damasio Antonio
Psychology, Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles, CA, United States.
Performance Science Institute, University of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jun 21;8:868. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00868. eCollection 2017.
Gratitude is a complex emotional feeling associated with universally desirable positive effects in personal, social, and physiological domains. Why or how gratitude achieves these functional outcomes is not clear. Toward the goal of identifying its' underlying physiological processes, we recently investigated the neural correlates of gratitude. In our study, participants were exposed to gratitude-inducing stimuli, and rated each according to how much gratitude it provoked. As expected, self-reported gratitude intensity correlated with brain activity in distinct regions of the medial pre-frontal cortex associated with social reward and moral cognition. Here we draw from our data and existing literature to offer a theoretical foundation for the physiological correlates of gratitude. We propose that mu-opioid signaling (1) accompanies the mental experience of gratitude, and (2) may account for the positive effects of gratitude on social relationships, subjective wellbeing, and physiological health.
感恩是一种复杂的情感，与个人、社会和生理领域普遍期望的积极影响相关。感恩为何或如何实现这些功能性结果尚不清楚。为了确定其潜在的生理过程，我们最近研究了感恩的神经关联。在我们的研究中，参与者接触引发感恩的刺激，并根据其引发的感恩程度对每个刺激进行评分。正如预期的那样，自我报告的感恩强度与内侧前额叶皮层不同区域的大脑活动相关，这些区域与社会奖励和道德认知有关。在这里，我们根据我们的数据和现有文献为感恩的生理关联提供理论基础。我们提出，μ-阿片类信号传导（1）伴随着感恩的心理体验，（2）可能解释了感恩对社会关系、主观幸福感和生理健康的积极影响。
