The causal role of the somatosensory cortex in prosocial behaviour
- Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Netherlands
- University of Bologna, Italy
Abstract
Witnessing another person's suffering elicits vicarious brain activity in areas active when we ourselves are in pain. Whether this activity influences prosocial behavior remains debated. Here participants witnessed a confederate express pain via a reaction of the swatted hand or via a facial expression and could decide to reduce that pain by donating money. Participants donate more money on trials in which the confederate expressed more pain. EEG shows that activity of the SI hand region explains variance in donation; TMS shows that altering this activity interferes with the pain-donation coupling only when pain is expressed by the hand and HD-tDCS that altering SI activity also interferes with pain perception. These experiments show vicarious somatosensory activations contribute to prosocial decision-making and suggest they do so by helping transform observed reactions of affected body-parts into accurate perceptions of pain that are necessary for decision making.
Data availability
fMRI and EEG data have been deposited in Zenodo. Source data files have been provided for all figures
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The causal role of the somatosensory cortex in prosocial behavior - Pain LocalizerPublicly available at Zenodo.
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The causal role of the somatosensory cortex in prosocial behavior - EEG datasetPublicly available at Zenodo.
Article and author information
Author details
Mario Carlo Severo
Funding
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (VIDI: 452-14-015)
- Valeria Gazzola
Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (NARSAD young investigator 22453)
- Valeria Gazzola
H2020 European Research Council (ERC-StG-312511)
- Christian Keysers
Cogito Foundation (R-117/13)
- Alessio Avenanti
Fundação Bial (298/16)
- Alessio Avenanti
Cogito Foundation (14-139-R)
- Alessio Avenanti
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All studies have been approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.Project identifiers:2016-BC-73942016-BC-71302016-PSY-64852014-EXT-34762014-EXT-3432All participants received monetary compensation and gave their informed consent for participation in the study.
Copyright
© 2018, Gallo et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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The causal role of the somatosensory cortex in prosocial behaviour
eLife 7:e32740.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.32740
