Week 6 refers to actions intended to benefit others and produce positive social outcomes. These actions may also provide personal rewards, such as pleasure or relief from guilt.

Prosocial Behavior

empathic concern is key motivator for prosocial and altruistic behavior

actions intended to benefit others and produce positive social outcomes. These actions may also provide personal rewards, such as pleasure or relief from guilt.

empathy

is the process by which perceiving another’s emotional state evokes a corresponding state in the observer—more aligned with the other’s situation than the observer’s own prior state
• Anterior insula (AI) and Anterior Cingulate Cortex

poll- (Answer honestly) With respect to human behavior, I believe that altruism is:

the rule rather than the exception

the exception rather than the rule

Movie - the process bride

decision making and cognitive bias

Altruism

empathic concern

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

Brain Structures associated with empathy

• Premotor areas (or cortices)

• Anterior insula

• Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)

• Dorsolateral and ventromedial PFC

• Fusiform area of temporal lobe

• Amygdala

• Cerebellum

• Hippocampus

and many others...

There is no single location in the brain where empathy exists (if it exist at all)!

Mirror neurons(premotor)

• fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe someone else performing the same action—suggesting a neural basis for understanding others' actions, intentions, and possibly emotions.

• “the great leap forward” in human evolution and play a crucial role in empathy

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ACC and AI activity to pain of others

These results suggest these two areas play the critical role in processing pain-related empathy

Writhing Experiment

These findings imply the communication of pain from one mouse to another through visual observation.

Cagemate and trapdoor

Rats that opened the restrainer showed increased neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and insula cortex

Emotional contagion:

The rapid (reflexive) spread of an emotion from one or a few individuals to others.

NO evidence of social transmission of fear in rats