ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2019
A role for the medial temporal lobe subsystem in guiding prosociality: the effect of episodic processes on willingness to help others.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT04681391 (The Role of Implicit Attitude in the tDCS Modulation on Moral Decision-Making), which is not on this map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
The Role of Implicit Attitude in the tDCS Modulation on Moral Decision-Making
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effects of compassion training on brain responses to suffering others.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Trial
- A large-scale heterogeneous 3D magnetic resonance brain imaging dataset for self-supervised learning.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Unsupervised skull segmentation in MR images utilizing modality translation and super-resolution.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Our ways will not change: Future collective continuity increases present prosocial considerations.The British journal of social psychology · 2025Article
- The involvement of rTPJ in intention attribution during social decision making: A TMS study.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Entorhinal grid-like codes and time-locked network dynamics track others navigating through space.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Transforming social perspectives with cognitive maps.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- The power of negative and positive episodic memories.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Review
- Moral psychology from the lab to the wild: Relief registries as a paradigm for studying real-world altruism.PloS one · 2022Article
- Irregular Baseline Brain Activity in Coronary Artery Disease Patients with Cognitive Impairment: A Resting-state Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.Current neurovascular research · 2022Article
- Birth order and prosociality in the early adolescent brain.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- EEG and fMRI evidence for autobiographical memory reactivation in empathy.Human brain mapping · 2021Article
- Pattern similarity and connectivity of hippocampal-neocortical regions support empathy for pain.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Why are we willing to help others? Recent behavioral work on episodic processes (i.e. the ability to represent an event that is specific in time and place) suggests that imagining and remembering scenes of helping a person in need increases intentions to help. Here, we provide insight into the cognitive and neural mechanisms that enhance prosocial intentions via episodic simulation and memory. In Experiment 1, we scanned participants using functional neuroimaging as they imagined and remembered helping episodes, and completed non-episodic control conditions accounting for exposure to the story of need and conceptual priming of helping. Analyses revealed that activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) subsystem, as well as the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) predicted the effect of conditions on the strength of prosocial intentions. In Experiment 2, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt activity in the RTPJ, and better isolate the contribution of MTL subsystem to prosocial intentions. The effect of conditions on willingness to help remained even when activity in the RTPJ was disrupted, suggesting that activity in the MTL subsystem may primarily support this prosocial effect. It seems our willingness to help may be guided, in part, by how easily we can construct imagined and remembered helping episodes.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.