Win for your kin: Neural responses to personal and vicarious rewards when mothers win for their adolescent children

Abstract

Mother-child relationships change considerably in adolescence, but it is not yet understood how mothers experience vicarious rewards for their adolescent children. In the current study, we investigated neural responses of twenty mothers winning and losing money for their best friend and for their adolescent child in a gambling task. During the task, functional neuroimaging data were acquired. We examined the activation patterns when playing for or winning for self, adolescent children and friends in four a-priori selected ROIs (nucleus accumbens, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus and temporo-parietal junction). Behaviorally, mothers indicated that they experienced most enjoyment when they gained money for their children and that their children deserved to win more, relative to friends and self. At the neural level, nucleus accumbens activity was stronger when winning versus losing. This pattern was not only found when playing for self, but also for friends and children, possibly reflecting the rewarding value of vicarious prosocial gains. In addition, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and temporo-parietal junction were more active when receiving outcomes for children and friends compared to self, possibly reflecting increased recruitment of mentalizing processes. Interestingly, activity in this network was stronger for mothers who indicated that their children and friends deserved to win more. These findings provide initial evidence that vicarious rewards for one’s children are processed similarly as rewards for self, and that activation in social brain regions are related to social closeness.

Friendship stability in adolescence is associated with ventral striatum responses to vicarious rewards

“…We found that higher ventral striatum activity related to more closeness with the concurrent best friend in participants with unstable best friendships. These results are in line with previous findings suggesting that the closeness of a relationship predicts striatum responses to vicarious rewards 8 , 35 , 36 . The findings showing that closeness did not explain individual variation in stable best friend relationships could be due to less variation in closeness experienced in stable best friendship (i.e., mostly high).…”

I am happy for us: Neural processing of vicarious joy when winning for parents versus strangers

“…In other words, these regions seemed to process vicarious rewards for fathers even in conditions where the participants themselves won nothing. These regions correspond to earlier findings (Schreuders, Klapwijk, Will, & Güroğlu, 2018;Spaans, Burke, et al, 2018a) during donation and vicarious reward tasks and are known to belong to a social brain network (Blakemore, 2008;Frith, 2007;Kanske, Böckler, Trautwein, & Singer, 2015). Interestingly, prior research by Mitchell, Macrae, and Banaji (2006) and subsequent meta-analyses (Denny, Kober, Wager, & Ochsner, 2012) revealed that the medial PFC and precuneus are important regions for differentiating between self and distant and close others.…”

“…others (Braams & Crone, 2017;Morelli et al, 2015;Spaans, Burke, et al, 2018a). No such effect was found when winning for strangers.…”

“…The parental targets of vicarious reward were baselined against an unknown stranger allowing for nonfamily (outgroup) control conditions. We investigated the neural processing during reward outcomes where each trial of our paradigm referred to a specific combination of rewards for oneself and for one other target individual, who could be the participant's mother, father, or an unfamiliar stranger (Spaans, Burke, et al, 2018a). We hypothesized that winning for oneself would elicit higher activation from the ventral striatum than would winning for all other targets (Morelli, Knutson, & Zaki, 2018).…”

Vicarious praise and pain: parental neural responses to social feedback about their adolescent child

“…Correspondingly, activation in these areas has also been found when parents make judgments about traits of their offspring ( Laurita et al. , 2019 ) or when mothers receive rewards for their offspring ( Spaans et al. , 2018 ).…”