Giving to others and neural processing during adolescence

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Lee Lazar¹  Adriana Galván¹  Macrina C. Dieffenbach²  Eveline A. Crone²  Maira Karan²  Carrianne J. Leschak²  Jessica P. Uy²  Eva H. Telzer²  Naomi I. Eisenberger²  Andrew J. Fuligni³ 

[1] Corresponding authors;Department of Psychology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA;Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands;

关键词: Adolescence;    Prosocial behavior;    Brain development;    FMRI;    Decision-making;   

DOI  :  

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Adolescence is marked by an increased sensitivity to the social environment as youth navigate evolving relationships with family, friends, and communities. Prosocial behavior becomes more differentiated such that older adolescents increasingly give more to known others (e.g., family, friends) than to strangers. This differentiation may be linked with changes in neural processing among brain regions implicated in social decision-making. A total of 269 adolescents from 9–15 and 19–20 years of age completed a decision-making task in which they could give money to caregivers, friends, and strangers while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Giving to caregivers and friends (at a cost to oneself) increased with age, but giving to strangers remained lower and stable across age. Brain regions implicated in cognitive control (dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) showed increased blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activation with increasing age across giving decisions to all recipients; regions associated with reward processing (ventral striatum and ventral tegmental area) showed increased activation across all ages when giving to all recipients. Brain regions associated with social cognition were either not active (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) or showed reduced activation (temporal parietal junction and posterior superior temporal sulcus) when giving to others across all ages. Findings have implications for understanding the role of brain development in the increased complexity of social decision-making during adolescence.

【 授权许可】

Unknown