Adolescent rats extend help to outgroup members, highlighting a neural network for group identity categorization.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Breton ◽  
Jordan S. Eisner ◽  
Vaidehi S. Gandhi ◽  
Natalie Musick ◽  
Aileen Zhang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Prosocial Behavior ◽  
Helping Behavior ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Ingroup Bias ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Adult Rats ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Adolescent Rats ◽  
Functional Modulation ◽  
Increased Activity

Prosocial behavior, in particular helping others in need, occurs preferentially in response to the perceived distress of one's own group members, or ingroup. The development of neural mechanisms underlying social selectivity towards ingroup members are not well established. Here, we used a rat helping behavior test to explore the development and neural basis of ingroup bias for prosocial behavior in adolescent rats. We previously found that adult rats selectively help others from their own social group, and that this selectivity is associated with activation in reward and motivation circuits. Surprisingly, we found that adolescent rats helped both ingroup and outgroup members, evidence suggesting that ingroup bias emerges in adulthood. Analysis of brain-wide neural activity, indexed by expression of the early-immediate gene c-Fos, revealed increased activity for ingroup members across a broad set of regions, which was congruent for adults and adolescents. However, adolescents showed reduced hippocampal and insular activity, and increased orbitofrontal cortex activity compared to adults. Adolescent rats who did not help trapped others also demonstrated increased amygdala connectivity. Together, these findings demonstrate that biases for group-dependent prosocial behavior develop with age in rats and suggest that specific brain regions contribute to this prosocial selectivity, overall pointing to possible targets for the functional modulation of ingroup bias.

scholarly journals Neural correlates of ingroup bias for prosociality in rats

eLife ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal ◽  
Jocelyn M Breton ◽  
Huanjie Sheng ◽  
Kimberly LP Long ◽  
Stella Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Helping Behavior ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Ingroup Bias ◽  
Helping Others ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Shared Network ◽  
In Vivo Calcium Imaging ◽  
Central Network

Prosocial behavior, in particular helping others in need, occurs preferentially in response to distress of one’s own group members. In order to explore the neural mechanisms promoting mammalian helping behavior, a discovery-based approach was used here to identify brain-wide activity correlated with helping behavior in rats. Demonstrating social selectivity, rats helped others of their strain (‘ingroup’), but not rats of an unfamiliar strain (‘outgroup’), by releasing them from a restrainer. Analysis of brain-wide neural activity via quantification of the early-immediate gene c-Fos identified a shared network, including frontal and insular cortices, that was active in the helping test irrespective of group membership. In contrast, the striatum was selectively active for ingroup members, and activity in the nucleus accumbens, a central network hub, correlated with helping. In vivo calcium imaging showed accumbens activity when rats approached a trapped ingroup member, and retrograde tracing identified a subpopulation of accumbens-projecting cells that was correlated with helping. These findings demonstrate that motivation and reward networks are associated with helping an ingroup member and provide the first description of neural correlates of ingroup bias in rodents.

The Impact of Helping Behavior on Outgroup Infrahumanization

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 1099-1109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naira Delgado ◽  
Verónica Betancor ◽  
Armando Rodríguez-Pérez ◽  
Eva Ariño
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Prosocial Behavior ◽  
Lexical Decision Task ◽  
Helping Behavior ◽  
Strong Tendency ◽  
Ingroup Bias ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
The Impact

Infrahumanization research has verified that in intergroup contexts, there is a strong tendency to attribute secondary emotions, which are uniquely human, to the ingroup, while limiting that attribution in outgroups. Experiments have shown it to be as common as ingroup bias. However, it is not yet known what characteristics may mitigate this trend. This paper presents two studies. The first analyzes the impact of helping behavior on attributions of human traits to two fictitious groups. The second study's objective was to determine if members of the Spanish ingroup would infrahumanize an Ethiopian outgroup less when that outgroup performs prosocial behavior towards another group. Infrahumanization was determined by a lexical decision task, using the names of ingroup and outgroup members as priming. The results demonstrate that describing a fictitious group in altruistic terms increases their human profile (experiment one) and reduces infrahumanization (experiment two).

scholarly journals Social cognition in members of conflict groups: behavioural and neural responses in Arabs, Israelis and South Americans to each other's misfortunes

2012 ◽  
Vol 367 (1589) ◽  
pp. 717-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emile G. Bruneau ◽  
Nicholas Dufour ◽  
Rebecca Saxe
Keyword(s):  
Brain Networks ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ingroup Bias ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Emotional Suffering ◽  
Brain Responses ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Group Members ◽  
South Americans

In contexts of cultural conflict, people delegitimize the other group's perspective and lose compassion for the other group's suffering. These psychological biases have been empirically characterized in intergroup settings, but rarely in groups involved in active conflict. Similarly, the basic brain networks involved in recognizing others' narratives and misfortunes have been identified, but how these brain networks are modulated by intergroup conflict is largely untested. In the present study, we examined behavioural and neural responses in Arab, Israeli and South American participants while they considered the pain and suffering of individuals from each group. Arabs and Israelis reported feeling significantly less compassion for each other's pain and suffering (the ‘conflict outgroup’), but did not show an ingroup bias relative to South Americans (the ‘distant outgroup’). In contrast, the brain regions that respond to others' tragedies showed an ingroup bias relative to the distant outgroup but not the conflict outgroup, particularly for descriptions of emotional suffering. Over all, neural responses to conflict group members were qualitatively different from neural responses to distant group members. This is the first neuroimaging study to examine brain responses to others' suffering across both distant and conflict groups, and provides a first step towards building a foundation for the biological basis of conflict.

scholarly journals Age- and location-dependent differences in store depletion-induced h-channel plasticity in hippocampal pyramidal neurons

2014 ◽  
Vol 111 (6) ◽  
pp. 1369-1382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann M. Clemens ◽  
Daniel Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Pyramidal Neurons ◽  
Cyclopiazonic Acid ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Adult Rats ◽  
Hippocampal Pyramidal Neurons ◽  
Store Depletion ◽  
Whole Cell Patch Clamp ◽  
Age Dependent ◽  
Adaptive Processes ◽  
Cellular Dysfunction

Disruptions of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) Ca2+ homeostasis are heavily linked to neuronal pathology. Depletion of ER Ca2+ stores can result in cellular dysfunction and potentially cell death, although adaptive processes exist to aid in survival. We examined the age and region dependence of one postulated, adaptive response to ER store-depletion (SD), hyperpolarization-activated cation-nonspecific ( h)-channel plasticity in neurons of the dorsal and ventral hippocampus (DHC and VHC, respectively) from adolescent and adult rats. With the use of whole-cell patch-clamp recordings from the soma and dendrites of CA1 pyramidal neurons, we observed a change in h-sensitive measurements in response to SD, induced by treatment with cyclopiazonic acid, a sarcoplasmic reticulum/ER Ca2+-ATPase blocker. We found that whereas DHC and VHC neurons in adolescent animals respond to SD with a perisomatic expression of SD h plasticity, adult animals express SD h plasticity with a dendritic and somatodendritic locus of plasticity in DHC and VHC neurons, respectively. Furthermore, SD h plasticity in adults was dependent on membrane potential and on the activation of L-type voltage-gated Ca2+ channels. These results suggest that cellular responses to the impairment of ER function, or ER stress, are dependent on brain region and age and that the differential expression of SD h plasticity could provide a neural basis for region- and age-dependent disease vulnerabilities.

Lacking status hinders prosocial behavior among the powerful

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (9) ◽  
pp. 1547-1560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yeri Cho ◽  
Nathanael J. Fast
Keyword(s):  
Low Power ◽  
Prosocial Behavior ◽  
High Power ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Helping Behavior ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Full Time ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Interpersonal Helping ◽  
Power Hierarchy

We conducted 2 studies to examine if status has varying effects on prosocial behavior for those at different levels of the power hierarchy. In Study 1 (N = 78), adults employed full-time in the USA responded to an online survey and the results showed that self-perceived power and status interacted to predict prosocial behavior. That is, lacking status led high-power, but not low-power, individuals to engage less in prosocial behavior. In Study 2 (N = 142), we orthogonally manipulated status and power and measured prosocial behavior. Once again, lacking status led to less helping behavior among high-power, but not low-power, participants. These findings show how power and status interact to influence interpersonal helping behavior. Implications for future research on social hierarchy and prosocial behavior are discussed.

The Structural Language Network

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela D. Friederici ◽  
Noam Chomsky
Keyword(s):  
White Matter ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Information Transfer ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Fiber Tracts ◽  
White Matter Fiber Tracts ◽  
The Right

An adequate description of the neural basis of language processing must consider the entire network both with respect to its structural white matter connections and the functional connectivities between the different brain regions as the information has to be sent between different language-related regions distributed across the temporal and frontal cortex. This chapter discusses the white matter fiber bundles that connect the language-relevant regions. The chapter is broken into three sections. In the first, we look at the white matter fiber tracts connecting the language-relevant regions in the frontal and temporal cortices; in the second, the ventral and dorsal pathways in the right hemisphere that connect temporal and frontal regions; and finally in the third, the two syntax-relevant and (at least) one semantic-relevant neuroanatomically-defined networks that sentence processing is based on. From this discussion, it becomes clear that online language processing requires information transfer via the long-range white matter fiber pathways that connect the language-relevant brain regions within each hemisphere and between hemispheres.

scholarly journals Understanding the Effects of General Anesthetics on Cortical Network Activity Using Ex Vivo Preparations

2019 ◽  
Vol 130 (6) ◽  
pp. 1049-1063 ◽  
Author(s):  
Logan J. Voss ◽  
Paul S. García ◽  
Harald Hentschke ◽  
Matthew I. Banks
Keyword(s):  
Molecular Mechanisms ◽  
Ex Vivo ◽  
Brain Slices ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Cortical Network ◽  
Network Activity ◽  
Common Mechanism ◽  
General Anesthetics ◽  
Neural Basis

Abstract General anesthetics have been used to ablate consciousness during surgery for more than 150 yr. Despite significant advances in our understanding of their molecular-level pharmacologic effects, comparatively little is known about how anesthetics alter brain dynamics to cause unconsciousness. Consequently, while anesthesia practice is now routine and safe, there are many vagaries that remain unexplained. In this paper, the authors review the evidence that cortical network activity is particularly sensitive to general anesthetics, and suggest that disruption to communication in, and/or among, cortical brain regions is a common mechanism of anesthesia that ultimately produces loss of consciousness. The authors review data from acute brain slices and organotypic cultures showing that anesthetics with differing molecular mechanisms of action share in common the ability to impair neurophysiologic communication. While many questions remain, together, ex vivo and in vivo investigations suggest that a unified understanding of both clinical anesthesia and the neural basis of consciousness is attainable.

scholarly journals The neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet : an fMRI study of acting

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 181908 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Brown ◽  
Peter Cockett ◽  
Ye Yuan
Keyword(s):  
Brain Activity ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
First Person ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Loss Of Self ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Mri Study

The current study represents a first attempt at examining the neural basis of dramatic acting. While all people play multiple roles in daily life—for example, ‘spouse' or ‘employee'—these roles are all facets of the ‘self' and thus of the first-person (1P) perspective. Compared to such everyday role playing, actors are required to portray other people and to adopt their gestures, emotions and behaviours. Consequently, actors must think and behave not as themselves but as the characters they are pretending to be. In other words, they have to assume a ‘fictional first-person' (Fic1P) perspective. In this functional MRI study, we sought to identify brain regions preferentially activated when actors adopt a Fic1P perspective during dramatic role playing. In the scanner, university-trained actors responded to a series of hypothetical questions from either their own 1P perspective or from that of Romeo (male participants) or Juliet (female participants) from Shakespeare's drama. Compared to responding as oneself, responding in character produced global reductions in brain activity and, particularly, deactivations in the cortical midline network of the frontal lobe, including the dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortices. Thus, portraying a character through acting seems to be a deactivation-driven process, perhaps representing a ‘loss of self'.

THE EFFECTS OF SOME DIETARY DERIVED LIPIDS AND FAT SOLUBLE VITAMINS ON RAT SERUM TRIBUTYRINASE AND ALKALINE PHOSPHATASE

1952 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 308-313
Author(s):  
Jack D. Taylor ◽  
Neil B. Madsen ◽  
Jules Tuba
Keyword(s):  
Fatty Acids ◽  
Alkaline Phosphatase ◽  
Oleic Acid ◽  
Stearic Acid ◽  
Serum Alkaline Phosphatase ◽  
Adult Rats ◽  
Rat Serum ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
Fat Soluble Vitamins ◽  
Increased Activity

Synthetic diets were fed to adult rats for four weeks to determine the effects of dietary stearic acid, oleic acid, glycerol, Crisco, and vitamins, A, D, and E on the activity of serum alkaline phosphatase and serum tributyrinase. On a diet devoid of fats or fatty acids, the rats manifested abnormally low enzyme levels, which for serum alkaline phosphatase fell to values characteristic of starvation. Basal levels of the two enzymes, obtained with a fat free diet, were not altered by the ingestion of glycerol or vitamins A, D, and E. Dietary stearic acid, oleic acid, and Crisco, each significantly increased activity of phosphatase and tributyrinase and it would appear that both enzymes are concerned with intestinal absorption of fatty acids. The effect of oleic acid was most pronounced with both enzymes. The rats all gained weight during the tests so none of the variations in enzyme levels can be attributed to inanition. After the dietary test periods, all groups were starved for one week. Serum phosphatase values fell to the same constant low levels for all animals. Tributyrinase values rose towards levels which suggest that the enzyme is concerned with mobilization of depot fats during periods of fasting.

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