Growing in generosity? The effects of giving magnitude, target, and audience on the neural signature of giving in adolescence

Giving to others and neural processing during adolescence

“…Age-related increases in the dlPFC were also demonstrated in the whole-brain analyses. Similar results were also reported in a recent study by ( van de Groep et al, 2022 ) and highlight the increased importance of regions in the lateral PFC for prosocial decision-making through the adolescent years. These regions have been implicated in the planning and inhibition of self-maximizing impulses when engaging in costly prosocial behavior ( Bellucci et al, 2020b , Crone and Fuligni, 2020 ).…”

“…The lack of target differences in any neural activation suggests that the brain regions analyzed in this study engage similarly across various potential recipients of prosocial giving during adolescence. Comparable findings were obtained in a recent study by van de Groep et al (2022) and together with ours, suggest that the developing adolescent brain will respond similarly to the same prosocial decision regardless of whether the recipients are friends, family members, or strangers. It is possible that there would be more differences in activation if additional information about the length, stability, and quality of the relationships with the target caregivers and friends were assessed or even manipulated, as done by Schreuders et al, 2018 , Schreuders et al, 2019 in their studies of giving to friends and disliked peers.…”

“…First, as suggested by recent studies ( Schreuders et al, 2019 , van de Groep et al, 2020a ), we predicted increased differentiation of activation according to target, with greater activation in regions in the cognitive control (dlPFC, vlPFC), social cognition (dmPFC, TPJ, pSTS), and reward processing (VS, VTA) networks when giving to caregivers and friends as compared to strangers. Alternatively, as was found by van de Groep et al (2022) in the PFC, there could be increased activation irrespective of target in regions associated with cognitive control, reward processing, and social cognition when giving to others across age given the significant developments and enhanced role of these three networks in decision-making in general during the adolescent period.…”

“…Yet these studies did not examine age differences and it is unclear whether the differential activation according to the recipient becomes greater across adolescence along with the increased differentiation in giving. A recent study that examined a wider age span (9–19 years of age) observed increased preference for giving to friends versus strangers across adolescence but did not find age differences in the differentiation of neural activation when giving to each recipient ( van de Groep et al, 2022 ). Instead, the most notable age difference was among older adolescents who demonstrated increased engagement of brain regions associated with cognitive control in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) when they made giving decisions, regardless of the recipient.…”

Giving to Others and Neural Processing During Adolescence

“…Padilla-Walker et al (2018) obtained similar patterns in a longitudinal study of adolescents' self-reports of giving support and helping others, and additionally found that prosocial behaviors directed towards family remained stable and then increased in late adolescence. Distinctions in adolescent prosocial behavior by target has been observed in other studies and has been argued to be due to adolescents' increasingly complex social reasoning such as a preference for known others and understanding the role of reciprocity in close relationships (Fehr et al, 2013;Güroglu et al, 2014;van de Groep et al, 2020b).…”