ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Help or flight? Increased threat imminence promotes defensive helping in humans.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Distinct prosocial behaviors associated with persistent symptom trajectories in psychiatric disorders.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Linking reaction time variability to physiological markers of arousal across timescales.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Dual-System Collaborative Model of Prosocial Risky Behavior and Cognitive Computation: A Review.PsyCh journal · 2025Review
- Threat-induced prosocial behavior: enhanced exogenous attention to protect others from harm.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Defensive responses: behaviour, the brain and the body.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2023Review
- Systematic evaluation of a predator stress model of depression in mice using a hierarchical 3D-motion learning framework.Translational psychiatry · 2023Article
- Are you more risk-seeking when helping others? Effects of situational urgency and peer presence on prosocial risky behavior.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Acute anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with higher levels of everyday altruism.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Reflection of Types of Prosocial Behavior During COVID-19 in Collectivistic Asian Countries-India and Indonesia.Qualitative health research · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In humans and other mammals, defensive responses to danger vary with threat imminence, but it is unknown how those responses affect decisions to help conspecifics. Here, we manipulated threat imminence to investigate the impact of different defensive states on human helping behaviour. Ninety-eight healthy adult participants made trial-by-trial decisions about whether to help a co-participant avoid an aversive shock, at the risk of receiving a shock themselves. Helping decisions were prompted under imminent or distal threat, based on temporal distance to the moment of shock administration to the co-participant. Results showed that, regardless of how likely participants were to also receive a shock, they helped the co-participant more under imminent than distal threat. Reaction times and cardiac changes during the task supported the efficacy of the threat imminence manipulation in eliciting dissociable defensive states, with faster responses and increased heart rate during imminent compared to distal threats. Individual differences in empathic concern were specifically correlated with helping during imminent threats. These results suggest that defensive states driving active escape from immediate danger may also facilitate decisions to help others, potentially by engaging neurocognitive systems implicated in caregiving across mammals.
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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.