ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2021
Computational and Neurobiological Substrates of Cost-Benefit Integration in Altruistic Helping Decision.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Neurocomputational Mechanisms Linking Future Interaction Prospects to Reactive and Proactive Costly Punishment.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Moral and perceptual conflict processing are implemented by distinct brain activation and functional connectivity patterns.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Maternal Social Support Reshapes the Offspring Brain Transcriptome to Buffer Prenatal Stress in Mice.Research square · 2026Article
- The neurophysiological correlates of altruism: A scoping review of fMRI, EEG, and autonomic studies.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Augmentation of frontoparietal gamma-band phase coupling enhances human altruistic behavior.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Prosocial decisions in naturalistic helping scenarios are predicted by cost-benefit tradeoffs and individual disposition.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Human neurocomputational mechanisms of guilt-driven and shame-driven altruistic behavior.eLife · 2025Article
- Exploring individual differences in the impact of cognitive constraints on prosocial decision-making via intrinsic brain connectivity.Brain imaging and behavior · 2025Article
- Divergent Neural Mechanisms of Self-Concerned and Prosocial Decision-Making Under High and Low Cognitive Loads.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Article
- A computational account of multiple motives guiding context-dependent prosocial behavior.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Context Modulates Perceived Fairness in Altruistic Punishment: Neural Signatures from ERPs and EEG Oscillations.Brain topography · 2024Article
- Distinct neural networks of task engagement and choice response in moral, risky, and ambiguous decision-making: An ALE meta-analysis.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Prosocial decision-making under time pressure: Behavioral and neural mechanisms.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Threat-induced anxiety and selfishness in resource sharing: Behavioral and neural evidence.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- A cost-benefit framework for prosocial motivation-Advantages and challenges.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Neurocomputational evidence that conflicting prosocial motives guide distributive justice.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- How resource sharing resists scarcity: the role of cognitive empathy and its neurobiological mechanisms.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Neural basis of prosocial behavior.Trends in neurosciences · 2022Review
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although altruistic behaviors, e.g., sacrificing one's own interests to alleviate others' suffering, are widely observed in human society, altruism varies greatly across individuals. Such individual differences in altruistic preference have been hypothesized to arise from both individuals' dispositional empathic concern for others' welfare and context-specific cost-benefit integration processes. However, how cost-benefit integration is implemented in the brain and how it is linked to empathy remain unclear. Here, we combine a novel paradigm with the model-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) approach to examine the neurocomputational basis of altruistic behaviors. Thirty-seven adults (16 females) were tested. Modeling analyses suggest that individuals are likely to integrate their own monetary costs with nonlinearly transformed recipients' benefits. Neuroimaging results demonstrate the involvement of an extended common currency system during decision-making by showing that selfish and other-regarding motives were processed in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and right inferior parietal lobe in a domain-general manner. Importantly, a functional dissociation of adjacent but different subregions within anterior insular cortex (aINS) was observed for different subprocesses underlying altruistic behaviors. While dorsal aINS (daINS) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) were involved in valuation of benefactors' costs, ventral aINS and middle INS (vaINS/mINS), as empathy-related regions, reflected individual variations in valuating recipients' benefits. Multivariate analyses further suggest that both vaINS/mINS and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) reflect individual variations in general altruistic preferences which account for both dispositional empathy and context-specific other-regarding tendency. Together, these findings provide valuable insights into our understanding of psychological and neurobiological basis of altruistic behaviors.
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