Prosocial Behavior and Decision Making

Flashcards covering prosocial behavior, empathy, and decision-making concepts discussed in the lecture notes.

Prosocial Behavior

Actions intended to benefit others and produce positive social outcomes, potentially driven by personal rewards or relief from guilt.

Altruism

A subset of prosocial behavior involving helping others without expectation of reward and sometimes at a personal cost.

Empathy

A process where perceiving another's emotional state evokes a similar state in the observer, aligned with the other's situation.

Sympathy

Concern for another's well-being without necessarily sharing their emotional state.

Emotional Contagion

Automatic mirroring of another's emotional state.

Mirror Neurons

Neurons in the premotor area that fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe someone else performing the same action.

Anterior Insula (AI) and Rostral Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)

Brain regions activated when experiencing pain and when observing a loved one in pain, mediating empathy for pain.

Social Modulation of Pain in Mice

Mice show higher pain sensitivity when exposed to cagemates in pain compared to strangers, indicating empathy.

Pro-Social Behavior in Rats

Rats learn to intentionally free cagemates from a restrainer, suggesting biological roots of empathetic helping behavior.

Emotional Contagion

The rapid spread of emotion from one individual to others.

Observational Fear Learning

Mice develop freezing behavior by observing other mice receive foot shocks; impaired by inactivation of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)

Area in the brain that, when inactivated, impaired observational fear learning.

Social transmission of Fear in Rats

Experiment indicated there is no current evidence of social transmission of fear in rats

Worker vs. Parasites

Involved rats individually learning to press a bar at one end to receive a small pellet of food at the other end then they are all put into a small room together.

Role of Anterior Cingulate Cortex in the Emergence of Worker-Parasite Relationship

Stable worker parasite relationship when 3 individually operant-conditioned rats were placed in a skinner box.

Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)

Helps make socially-driven interactions and decision-making processes.

Conflict monitoring

Detecting conflicts in information processing

Cost-benefit analysis

Animal studies and schedule of reinforcement

Social cognition

Tracking motivation of others