SynthesisNeuroscience and biobehavioral reviews2020
Neural signatures of prosocial behaviors.
Synthesis in Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 97 citations in OpenAlex.
- Loving-Kindness Meditation: Systematic Review of Neuroimaging Correlates in Long-Term Practitioners and Clinical Implications.Brain and behavior · 2025Pooled it
- tDCS effect on prosocial behavior: a meta-analytic review.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- A Domain-General Developmental "Do-GooD" Network Model of Prosocial Cognition in Adolescence: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- A feature-based network analysis and fMRI meta-analysis reveal three distinct types of prosocial decisions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Impact of meditation on brain age derived from multimodal neuroimaging in experts and older adults from a randomized trial.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- The role of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex on voluntary emotion regulation of social pain.Human brain mapping · 2023Trial
- Distinct prosocial behaviors associated with persistent symptom trajectories in psychiatric disorders.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Neural representations of the value of helping the family during adolescence.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- The neurophysiological correlates of altruism: A scoping review of fMRI, EEG, and autonomic studies.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- An Exploratory Study of Social Skills Deficits and Suicide Attempts in Adolescent Psychiatric Inpatients: A Machine Learning Analysis of Goldstein's ART Framework.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Article
- Sustained dorsolateral prefrontal cortex response to prosocial reward predicts lower real-world negative emotional inertia.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Self-allocation bias in performance-based cooperative decisions is driven by self-interest rather than distorted performance encoding.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Environmental unpredictability predicts positive social risk taking through neural cognitive control.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Seeing and deciding to help: neural and attentional mechanisms of prosociality in younger and older adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- How helping others helps us: neural mechanisms linking prosocial behavior to psychological and physical wellbeing.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
- Disrupting the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Attenuates the Difference in Decision-Making for Altruistic Punishment Between the Gain and Loss Contexts.Brain topography · 2024Article
- Age-related changes in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activation are associated with daily prosocial behaviors two years later.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Article
- Prosocial decision-making under time pressure: Behavioral and neural mechanisms.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Neural Representation of Donating Time and Money.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Prosocial behaviors are hypothesized to require socio-cognitive and empathic abilities-engaging brain regions attributed to the mentalizing and empathy brain networks. Here, we tested this hypothesis with a coordinate-based meta-analysis of 600 neuroimaging studies on prosociality, mentalizing and empathy (∼12,000 individuals). We showed that brain areas recruited by prosocial behaviors only partially overlap with the mentalizing (dorsal posterior cingulate cortex) and empathy networks (middle cingulate cortex). Additionally, the dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortices were preferentially activated by prosocial behaviors. Analyses on the functional connectivity profile and functional roles of the neural patterns underlying prosociality revealed that in addition to socio-cognitive and empathic processes, prosocial behaviors further involve evaluation processes and action planning, likely to select the action sequence that best satisfies another person's needs. By characterizing the multidimensional construct of prosociality at the neural level, we provide insights that may support a better understanding of normal and abnormal social cognition (e.g., psychopathy).
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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.