Vekaria Kruti M, O'Connell Katherine, Rhoads Shawn A, Brethel-Haurwitz Kristin M, Cardinale Elise M, Robertson Emily L, Walitt Brian, VanMeter John W, Marsh Abigail A
Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA.
Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA.
Cortex. 2020 Jun;127:67-77. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.02.001. Epub 2020 Feb 18.
Everyday prosociality includes helping behaviors such as holding doors or giving directions that are spontaneous and low-cost and are performed frequently by the average person. Such behaviors promote a wide array of positive outcomes that include increased well-being, trust, and social capital, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support these behaviors are not yet well understood. Whereas costly altruistic responding to others' distress is associated with elevated reactivity in the amygdala, we hypothesized that everyday prosociality would be more closely associated with activation in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), a region of the extended amygdala known for its roles in maintaining vigilance for relevant socio-affective environmental cues and in supporting parental care. One previous study of the neural correlates of everyday prosociality highlighted a functional cluster identified as the septal area but which overlapped with established coordinates of BNST. We used an anatomical mask of BNST (Torrisi et al., 2015) to evaluate the association of BNST activation and daily helping in a sample of 25 adults recruited from the community as well as 23 adults who had engaged in acts of extraordinary altruism. Results found that activation in left BNST during an empathy task predicted everyday helping over a subsequent 14-day period in both samples. BNST activation most strongly predicted helping strangers and proactive helping. We conclude that beyond facilitating care for offspring, activation in BNST may provide a basis for the motivation to engage in a broad array of everyday helping behaviors.
日常亲社会行为包括诸如开门或指路等帮助行为，这些行为是自发的、低成本的，且普通人经常会做出。此类行为能带来一系列积极结果，包括幸福感、信任和社会资本的提升，但支持这些行为的认知和神经机制尚未得到充分理解。尽管对他人痛苦做出高成本的利他反应与杏仁核反应性增强有关，但我们推测日常亲社会行为可能与终纹床核（BNST）的激活更密切相关，终纹床核是扩展杏仁核的一个区域，以其在维持对相关社会情感环境线索的警觉以及支持亲代抚育方面的作用而闻名。此前一项关于日常亲社会行为神经关联的研究强调了一个被确定为隔区的功能簇，但它与已确立的BNST坐标重叠。我们使用BNST的解剖学掩膜（托里西等人，2015年）来评估BNST激活与日常帮助行为之间的关联，样本包括从社区招募的25名成年人以及23名曾有过非凡利他行为的成年人。结果发现，在共情任务中左侧BNST的激活在随后14天内预测了两个样本中的日常帮助行为。BNST激活最强烈地预测了帮助陌生人以及主动帮助行为。我们得出结论，除了促进对后代的照料外，BNST的激活可能为参与广泛日常帮助行为的动机提供基础。
