Prosocial Behavior Pt. 2

Visual Cues

What are often considered crucial for promoting prosocial behaviors?

Facial Expressions

Reflect emotions and may serve an evolutionarily conserved role in social behavior across species

Anterior Cingulate Cortex

Has roles in Conflict monitoring (or detecting conflicts in information processing; e.g., human imaging studies and Stroop Test), Cost benefit analysis (e.g., animal studies and schedule of reinforcement), and Social cognition (e.g., tracking the motivation of others)

Social settings

ACC inactivation suppresses worker’s lever pushing under…

Both social and individual settings

Amygdala inactivation suppresses lever pressing under…

C-Fos

neural activity marker

Muscimol

what scientists injected into the rats to inactivate certain sections

H. Oldfield Box's experiment

Replicated Mowrer’s original finding with 3 rats. Similar findings using 2 to 5 subjects (i.e., one rat becomes ‘worker’ while others become ‘parasites’). When 3 worker rats that emerged from 3 different groups were placed in the social problem situation, after a brief period of stalemate, one became worker and two became parasites. When 3 parasite rats from 3 different groups were placed together, after a relatively longer period of stalemate, one became worker and two became parasites.

O.H. Mowrer's experiment

3 rats are individually trained to press the lever to get food and then all three rats are put into a skinner box, a social problem is created and one rat becomes the worker while the other two are the parasites