Happy for Us not Them: Differences in neural activation in a vicarious reward task between family and strangers during adolescent development

Abstract

During adolescence social-interactions with other people become more relevant. One key aspect of these interactions is cooperative behavior. Cooperation relies on a set of cognitive and affective mechanisms. In this study, we focused on the mental ability to feel happy for another person’s positive experience, called vicarious joy. We investigated the neural mechanisms of this ability using a false-choice vicarious reward fMRI task. Participants played a game where they could win monetary rewards for themselves, their mother, their father, and a stranger. A region-of-interest (ROI) analysis of the Nucleus Accumbens revealed robust activation in this region for personal reward as well as vicarious rewards for both parents. Vicarious reward for a stranger was not associated with activation within the Nucleus Accumbens. ROI activation was associated with self-reported vicarious joy for mother and father. A Prisoner’s Dilemma game outside the scanner showed an increase in cooperative behavior until age 14 for parents and strangers, followed by a decline for the stranger but not for the parents. Together, these findings demonstrate that adolescence is an important time for developing ingroup-outgroup relations.

A Domain-General Developmental “Do-GooD” Network Model of Prosocial Cognition in Adolescence: A Systematic Review

“…Nineteen studies reported prosocial neural correlates concurrently with a prosocial decision-making task. Seven of these used the Dictator Game ( Moor et al, 2012 ; Güroğlu et al, 2014 ; Will et al, 2016 , 2018 ; Schreuders et al, 2018 , 2019 ; Duell et al, 2021 ), and five used close variations on the Dictator Game, including either the Allocation Game ( Do and Telzer, 2019 ; Do et al, 2019 ), the Family Assistance Task ( Telzer et al, 2011 , 2013 ), or the Charity of Self Yield Task ( Spaans et al, 2020 ; Brandner et al, 2021 ). The seven remaining studies used various games that also involved resource distribution: the Socially Mindful task ( Lemmers-Jansen et al, 2018 ), the Altruism Antisocial Game ( Sakai et al, 2017 ), the Trust Game ( van den Bos et al, 2009 , 2011 ), the Public Goods Game ( Van Hoorn et al, 2016 ), and Cyberball ( van der Meulen et al, 2016 ; Tousignant et al, 2018 ).…”

“…Eight studies compared (pro)social decision-making in general (i.e., the deliberation phase) to neutral/non-prosocial control conditions (hereafter, “prosocial decision-making”) ( van den Bos et al, 2011 ; Moor et al, 2012 ; Van Hoorn et al, 2016 ; Sakai et al, 2017 ; Lemmers-Jansen et al, 2018 ; Tousignant et al, 2018 ; Will et al, 2018 ; Duell et al, 2021 ). Eleven studies contrasted prosocial decision-making trials based on the actual prosocial choice such that decision-making with prosocial outcomes were compared to decision-making with non-prosocial outcomes (hereafter, “prosocial choices”) ( Telzer et al, 2011 , 2013 ; Güroğlu et al, 2014 ; Lemmers-Jansen et al, 2018 ; Schreuders et al, 2018 , 2019 ; Do and Telzer, 2019 ; Do et al, 2019 ; Spaans et al, 2020 ; van der Meulen et al, 2016 ; Brandner et al, 2021 ). Twelve studies analyzed neural activation during prosocial decision-making that correlated with the frequency of making prosocial choices, and therefore accounts for between-person differences (hereafter, “giving frequency” or “behavior frequency”) ( van den Bos et al, 2009 , 2011 ; Masten et al, 2010 ; Moor et al, 2012 ; Güroğlu et al, 2014 ; Overgaauw et al, 2014 ; Will et al, 2016 ; Schreuders et al, 2018 ; Tashjian et al, 2018 ; Tousignant et al, 2018 ; Ferschmann et al, 2019 ; Okada et al, 2019 ).…”

“…Studies that analyzed prosocial decision-making found activation in the bilateral striatum ( Will et al, 2018 ) including the dorsal striatum ( van den Bos et al, 2011 ) and the caudate ( Sakai et al, 2017 ; Tousignant et al, 2018 ; Duell et al, 2021 ). Prosocial choices across adolescence frequently implicated the ventral striatum (VS) ( van den Bos et al, 2009 ; Telzer et al, 2013 ; Güroğlu et al, 2014 ) including the nucleus accumbens ( Spaans et al, 2020 ; van der Meulen et al, 2016 ; Brandner et al, 2021 ), with greater VS activation when decisions were prosocial. The VS also had significant functional connectivity relating to prosocial choices in other regions, including the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) adolescents behaved equitably with outgroups ( Do and Telzer, 2019 ), and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), and right medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in young adults making costly donations ( Telzer et al, 2011 ).…”

“…The midbrain was also identified during both decision-making ( Sakai et al, 2017 ) and prosocial choices ( Telzer et al, 2013 ). Lastly, the VMPFC was identified in youth during prosocial decision-making ( Güroğlu et al, 2014 ; Tousignant et al, 2018 ; Will et al, 2018 ; Duell et al, 2021 ), its activation during decision-making interacted with pubertal hormone changes ( Duell et al, 2021 ), and its activation was greater for prosocial choices ( Güroğlu et al, 2014 ; Spaans et al, 2020 ; Brandner et al, 2021 ). One study additionally found a correlation between nucleus accumbens and VMPFC activation during prosocial choices ( Brandner et al, 2021 ).…”

Reinforcement Learning and Bayesian Inference Provide Complementary Models for the Unique Advantage of Adolescents in Stochastic Reversal

“…Research on adolescent development has often focused on aspects with negative reallife outcomes, including elevated risk-taking and sensation seeking (Braams et al, 2015;Galvan et al, 2006;Harden and Tucker-Drob, 2011;Romer and Hennessy, 2007), but positive aspects have become evident more recently, too (DePasque and Galván, 2017;Sercombe, 2014). For example, adolescents have outperformed adults in certain measures of creativity (Kleibeuker et al, 2013) and showed enhanced social learning (Brandner et al, 2021;Gopnik et al, 2017) and exploration (Somerville et al, 2017). With particular interest to our hypothesis, adolescents have outperformed adults on stochastic learning tasks (Cauffman et al, 2010;Davidow et al, 2016) and some aspects of a reversal-learning task (van der Schaaf et al, 2011;Fig.…”