Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea.
Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta GA, USA.
Neuroimage. 2021 Oct 15;240:118333. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118333. Epub 2021 Jul 3.
Compassion is closely associated with prosocial behavior. Although there is growing interest in developing strategies that cultivate compassion, most available strategies rely on effortful reflective processes. Furthermore, few studies have investigated neurocognitive mechanisms underlying compassion-dependent improvement of prosocial responses. We devised a novel implicit compassion promotion task that operates based on association learning and examined its prosocial effects in two independent experiments. In Experiment 1, healthy adults were assigned to either the compassion or control group. For the intervention task, the compassion group completed word fragments that were consistently related to compassionate responses toward others; in contrast, the control group completed word fragments related to emotionally neutral responses toward others. Following the intervention task, we measured attentional biases to fearful, sad, and happy faces. Prosocial responses were assessed using two measures of helping: the pen-drop test and the helping intentions rating test. In Experiment 2, independent groups of healthy adults completed the same intervention tasks used in Experiment 1. Inside a functional MRI scanner, participants rated empathic care and distress based on either distressful or neutral video clips. Outside the scanner, we assessed the degree of helping intentions toward the victims depicted in the distressful clips. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the compassion promotion task reduced attentional vigilance to fearful faces, which in turn mediated a compassion promotion task-dependent increase in helping intentions. In Experiment 2, relative to the control group, the compassion group showed reduced empathic distress and increased activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex in response to others' suffering. Furthermore, increased functional connectivity of the medial orbitofrontal and inferior parietal cortex, predicted by reduced empathic distress, explained the increase in helping intentions. These results suggest the potential of implicit compassion promotion intervention to modulate compassion-related and prosocial responses as well as highlight the brain activation and connectivity related to these responses, contributing to our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying compassion-dependent prosocial improvement.
同情与亲社会行为密切相关。虽然人们越来越感兴趣地开发培养同情心的策略，但大多数可用的策略都依赖于费力的反思过程。此外，很少有研究调查过同情依赖的亲社会反应改善背后的神经认知机制。我们设计了一种新的基于联想学习的隐性同情促进任务，并在两个独立的实验中研究了它对亲社会的影响。在实验 1 中，健康成年人被分配到同情组或对照组。对于干预任务，同情组完成与对他人有同情心的反应一致的单词片段；相比之下，对照组完成与对他人的情绪中性反应一致的单词片段。干预任务完成后，我们测量了对恐惧、悲伤和快乐的面孔的注意力偏差。使用两个帮助测量方法来评估亲社会反应：笔掉落测试和帮助意图评分测试。在实验 2 中，独立的健康成年人组完成了与实验 1 中使用的相同干预任务。在功能性磁共振成像扫描仪内，参与者根据痛苦或中性视频剪辑对共情关怀和痛苦进行评分。在扫描仪外，我们评估了对痛苦剪辑中描述的受害者的帮助意图程度。实验 1 的结果表明，同情促进任务降低了对恐惧面孔的注意力警觉，这反过来又介导了同情促进任务依赖性的帮助意图增加。在实验 2 中，与对照组相比，同情组在对他人的痛苦做出反应时表现出较低的共情痛苦和内侧眶额皮层活动增加。此外，由共情痛苦减少预测的内侧眶额和下顶叶皮层的功能连接增加，解释了帮助意图的增加。这些结果表明，隐性同情促进干预有可能调节与同情相关的亲社会反应，并强调与这些反应相关的大脑激活和连接，有助于我们理解同情依赖的亲社会改善背后的神经认知机制。
