Acute stress during witnessing injustice shifts third-party interventions from punishing the perpetrator to helping the victim.

People tend to intervene in others' injustices by either punishing the transgressor or helping the victim. Injustice events often occur under stressful circumstances. However, how acute stress affects a third party's intervention in injustice events remains open. Here, we show a stress-induced shift in third parties' willingness to engage in help instead of punishment by acting on emotional salience and central-executive and theory-of-mind networks. Acute stress decreased the third party's willingness to punish the violator and the severity of the punishment and increased their willingness to help the victim. Computational modeling revealed a shift in preference of justice recovery from punishment the offender toward help the victim under stress. This finding is consistent with the increased dorsolateral prefrontal engagement observed with higher amygdala activity and greater connectivity with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in the stress group. A brain connectivity theory-of-mind network predicted stress-induced justice recovery in punishment. Our findings suggest a neurocomputational mechanism of how acute stress reshapes third parties' decisions by reallocating neural resources in emotional, executive, and mentalizing networks to inhibit punishment bias and decrease punishment severity.

When advisors do not know what is best for advisees: Uncertainty inhibits advice giving.

While seeking advice can be beneficial for advisees, advisors may not always possess the necessary knowledge to provide appropriate guidance. Poor-quality advice can mislead advisees rather than offering assistance. Despite the research interest in advisees, few studies have investigated advisors' psychological and behavioral responses, especially when they faced uncertainty regarding the optimal course of action for advisees. To fill this gap, we developed novel paradigms aiming at manipulating advisors' uncertainty, allowing for a systematic investigation of advisors' behavior, motivation, and emotion. Across four studies, we consistently found that advisors under uncertainty give less advice. Furthermore, we observed that uncertainty modulates advisors' motivation to influence, worry about harm to others, and/or sense of power. The motivation to influence and/or worry about harm to others can mediate the effect of uncertainty on advice giving. Besides, we identified nuanced distinctions in the effects of ambiguity and risk, two distinct types of uncertainty, on advisors' psychological processes. Our findings shed light on advisors' self-monitoring of the quality of their advice, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of advisor-advisee communication from the perspective of advisors.

Common and distinct equity preferences in children and adults.

Fairness plays a crucial role in children's social life and has garnered considerable attention. However, previous research and theories primarily examined the development of children's fairness behaviors in the conflict between self-interest motivation and fairness-complying motivation, neglecting the influence of advantage-seeking motivation. Moreover, despite the well-established role of gain/loss frame in human decision-making, it remains largely unclear whether the framing effect modulates fairness behaviors in children. It was hypothesized that children would exhibit advantage-seeking motivation resulting in more selfish behaviors in the loss context. To examine the hypothesis, we combined an adapted dictator game and computational modeling to investigate various motivations underlying fairness behaviors of children in both loss and gain contexts and to explore the developmental directions by contrasting children and adults. In addition, the current design enabled the dissociation between fairness knowledge and behaviors by asking participants to decide for themselves (the first-party role) or for others (the third-party role). This study recruited a total of 34 children (9-10 years, Mage = 9.82, SDage = 0.38, 16 females) and 31 college students (Mage = 19.81, SDage = 1.40, 17 females). The behavioral results indicated that children behaved more selfishly in first-party and more fairly in third-party than adults, without any significant framing effects. The computational results revealed that both children and adults exhibited aversion to advantageous and disadvantageous inequity in third-party. However, they showed distinct preferences for advantageous inequity in first-party, with advantage-seeking preferences among children and aversion to advantageous inequity among adults. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of children's social preferences and their developmental directions.

Moral emotions underlie puritanical morality.

Fitouchi et al. illustrate the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality, while leave the emotional foundation unclear. We complement their theory by proposing moral emotions (e.g., guilt and shame) as characteristic emotions underlying puritanical morality. Our proposition is based on the findings that these moral emotions emerge after violations of puritanical norms and promote self-control and cooperation.

Social incentives foster cooperation through guilt aversion: An effect that diminishes with primary psychopathic traits.

The association between primary psychopathic traits and non-cooperative behaviors is well-identified. There is a lack of studies on how to motivate cooperative behaviors in individuals with primary psychopathic traits. This study investigated the effects of monetary incentives and social incentives on promoting cooperation in healthy adults with varying primary psychopathic traits. Participants played a one-shot public goods game (PGG) with other anonymous players in three different contexts: a social incentives context where participants' decisions would be judged by others, a monetary incentives context where participants' decisions would result in winning or losing money depending on their contributions, and a control condition where no additional incentives were implemented. We found that, compared to the control condition, both monetary and social incentives significantly improved participants' contributions to the public project-an indicator of cooperative behavior. However, the association between higher primary psychopathic traits and less cooperation was only observed in the context of social incentives. Computational modeling further revealed that this effect can be explained by the diminishing guilt aversion when participants deliberately violated their inferred expectations of themselves from others' perspectives. This study found that social incentives can encourage cooperative behaviors in non-clinical psychopathy, and identified the mental processes navigating this effect.

Help or punishment: acute stress moderates basal testosterone's association with prosocial behavior.

The gonadal hormone testosterone is well-recognized to facilitate various behaviors for obtaining social status. A good reputation (i.e. competitive, generous, and trustworthy) is of crucial importance for acquiring high social status. It is unclear which type of reputation is preferred by individuals under the influence of testosterone. Given that the recent dual-hormone hypothesis emphasizes the modulating effect of stress (cortisol) on the influence of testosterone, it would be intriguing to test the role of stress-induced cortisol in testosterone-related reputation seeking. To test this hypothesis, we induced acute stress in 93 participants with cold pressor test (CPT) paradigm (vs. control condition), and then they were instructed to play a third-party intervention game, in which they made decisions as an uninvolved, outside the third party to punish a violator, help a victim, or do nothing. Salivary samples were obtained to assess participants' testosterone and cortisol levels. We split the testosterone concentration by median to low endogenous testosterone (LT) and high endogenous testosterone (HT). We found that HT individuals' prosocial preferences did not affect by acute stress. They were more likely to choose punishment than helping under both stress and control conditions. In contrast, individuals with low testosterone were more inclined to help than punish under control conditions. Interestingly, acute stress brought behavior patterns of LT individuals closer to those of HT individuals, that is, they reduced their helping behavior and increased the intensity of punishments. In this preliminary study on the preference inducement of testosterone for different types of prosocial behaviors, we discuss the physiological mechanism of the relationship between testosterone and reputation and the implications of these results for the dual-hormone hypothesis.HIGHLIGHTSLow testosterone (LT) individuals were more inclined to help than punish.High testosterone (HT) individuals were more inclined to punish than help.The HT individuals' preferences for prosocial types were not affected by acute stress.Acute stress brought the behavior patterns of LT individuals closer to those of HT individuals.

Mortality salience enhances neural activities related to guilt and shame when recalling the past.

Mortality salience (MS) influences cognition and behavior. However, its effect on emotion (especially moral emotions) and the underlying neural correlates are unclear. We investigated how MS priming modulated guilt and shame in a later recall task using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The behavioral results indicated that MS increased self-reported guilt but not shame. The neural results showed that MS strengthened neural activities related to the psychological processes of guilt and shame. Specifically, for both guilt and shame, MS increased activation in a region associated with self-referential processing (ventral medial prefrontal cortex). For guilt but not shame, MS increased the activation of regions associated with cognitive control (orbitofrontal cortex) and emotion processing (amygdala). For shame but not guilt, MS decreased brain functional connectivity related to self-referential processing. A direct comparison showed that MS more strongly decreased a functional connectivity related to self-referential processing in the shame than in the guilt condition. Additionally, the activation of insula during MS priming was partly predictive of neural activities related to guilt and shame in the subsequent recall task. Our study sheds light on the psychological and neural mechanisms of MS effects on moral emotions and provides theoretical insights for enriching terror management theory.

From gratitude to injustice: Neurocomputational mechanisms of gratitude-induced injustice.

Gratitude shapes individuals' behaviours and impacts the harmony of society. Many previous studies focused on its association with prosocial behaviours. A possibility that gratitude can lead to moral violation has been overlooked until recently. Nevertheless, the neurocognitive mechanisms of gratitude-induced moral violation are still unclear. On the other hand, though neural correlates of the gratitude's formation have been examined, the neural underpinnings of gratitude-induced behaviour remain unknown. For addressing these two overlapped research gaps, we developed novel tasks to investigate how participants who had received voluntary (Gratitude group) or involuntary help (Control group) punished their benefactors' unfairness with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The Gratitude group punished their benefactors less than the Control group. The self-report and computational modelling results demonstrated a crucial role of the boosted protection tendency on behalf of benefactors in the gratitude-induced injustice. The fMRI results showed that activities in the regions associated with mentalizing (temporoparietal junction) and reward processing (ventral medial prefrontal cortex) differed between the groups and were related to the gratitude-induced injustice. They suggest that grateful individuals concern for benefactors' benefits, value chances to interact with benefactors, and refrain from action that perturbs relationship-building (i.e., exert less punishment on benefactors' unfairness), which reveal a dark side of gratitude and enrich the gratitude theory (i.e., the find-bind-remind theory). Our findings provide psychological, computational, and neural accounts of the gratitude-induced behaviour and further the understanding of the nature of gratitude.

Acute psychosocial stress increases third-party helping but not punishing behavior.

Despite extensive research on the effects of stress on the brain and behaviors, there is a debate whether stress promotes prosocial behaviors, especially acute stress due to intricate costly punishment in the ultimatum game. Therefore, the present study introduced an irrelevant third party to examine how acute stress and the triggered cortisol influence third parties' punishing and helping behaviors as more convincing altruistic behaviors. The 65 participants were exposed to a psychosocial stressor (n = 33) or a control condition (n = 32). Afterwards, two third-party intervention tasks (a token allocation task and criminal scenario judgment task) were completed, during which the participants, as an "irrelevant" third party, could choose whether to sacrifice their own interests to help the victim or punish the transgressor. Participants' affective states, heart rate, and salivary cortisol were repeatedly measured throughout the experiment. Results showed that acute stress can lead to more third-party helping behaviors but not more punishing behaviors. Specifically, participants under stress tended to transfer more monetary units to the victim in the token allocation task than the control-group participants, and they tended to help the victim in the scenario task. In contrast, there was no significant difference in punishing behavior between the stressed and control participants. These findings reveal that acute psychosocial stress triggers the "tend and befriend" response, which might reflect the prosocial intuition under acute stress.

Effect of intranasal oxytocin administration on self-other distinction: Modulations by psychological distance and gender.

Preliminary evidence indicates that intranasal oxytocin (OT) administration modulates one's ability to distinguish oneself from others (i.e., self-other distinction). However, previous findings on this topic are contradictory. The current study addressed this issue by (i) using a novel perceptual matching task examining self-other distinction compared to both close and distant others, and (ii) tentatively exploring potential modulations by gender. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized OT administration study, 100 participants (50 males and 50 females) were randomized to receive intranasal spray of 24 IU OT or placebo (PL). Afterwards, participants completed a geometry perceptual matching task in which different shapes were paired to the self, a friend, or a stranger. Participants were then asked to judge whether each pair of shapes and labels was correctly matched. The results revealed that compared to PL administration, OT facilitated distinction between the self and a friend in males but not in females. These findings provide insights for debates on the role of OT in self-other distinction by revealing modulations by psychological distance and gender, which have implications for the potential clinical applications of OT.

Intranasal oxytocin reduces reactive aggression in men but not in women: A computational approach.

Aggression is an important behaviour that concerns individual survival and large-scale social stability. It comprises a variety of psychological subcomponents and is modulated by different biological factors. Two factors in particular, gender and oxytocin, appear to play a robust role in aggressive behaviour. However, whether these two factors interact to impact aggressive behaviour is not currently known. The current study investigated the modulating effect of gender on the relationship between oxytocin and aggression and characterized its underlying mechanisms by combining behavioural economic, pharmacological, and computational approaches. Specifically, we employed a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, between-subjects design, in which one hundred participants (50 men and 50 women) completed a norm-training version of the multi-round one-shot ultimatum game (UG) after intranasal oxytocin or placebo administration. Rejection rates in the UG were adopted as an indicator of reactive aggression. The results indicated that oxytocin compared with placebo administration decreased aggression among men but not among women. Further analyses suggested that this decrease in aggression was a result of changes in men's sensitivity to provocation and positive affect, rather than norm adaptation rates or concerns about the cost of aggression. These findings highlight the role of gender in the relationship between oxytocin and reactive aggression and reveal its underlying psychological and computational mechanisms.

Connectome-based model predicts individual differences in propensity to trust.

Trust constitutes a fundamental basis of human society and plays a pivotal role in almost every aspect of human relationships. Although enormous interest exists in determining the neuropsychological underpinnings of a person's propensity to trust utilizing task-based fMRI; however, little progress has been made in predicting its variations by task-free fMRI based on whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC). Here, we combined a one-shot trust game with a connectome-based predictive modeling approach to predict propensity to trust from whole-brain RSFC. We demonstrated that individual variations in the propensity to trust were primarily predicted by RSFC rooted in the functional integration of distributed key nodes-caudate, amygdala, lateral prefrontal cortex, temporal-parietal junction, and the temporal pole-which are part of domain-general large-scale networks essential for the motivational, affective, and cognitive aspects of trust. We showed, further, that the identified brain-behavior associations were only evident for trust but not altruistic preferences and that propensity to trust (and its underlying neural underpinnings) were modulated according to the extent to which a person emphasizes general social preferences (i.e., horizontal collectivism) rather than general risk preferences (i.e., trait impulsiveness). In conclusion, the employed data-driven approach enables to predict propensity to trust from RSFC and highlights its potential use as an objective neuromarker of trust impairment in mental disorders.

Early distinction between shame and guilt processing in an interpersonal context.

Shame and guilt have been compared in many behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. However, the time course of shame and guilt processing remains unknown. We conducted an event-related potential (ERP) study to investigate the temporal dynamics of shame and guilt in an interpersonal context. Behaviorally, participants reported "shame" when their wrong advice was correctly rejected by a confederate, whereas reported "guilt" when their wrong advice resulted in economic loss of a confederate. The ERP results showed significant difference between the shame and guilt conditions in the early P2 component (140-220 ms) over the frontal region and the alpha oscillations (240-1000 ms) over the parietal region. No significant difference was found between the shame and guilt conditions in the N2, P3, and theta oscillations. These results supported previous findings that shame compared to guilt involves more self-referential processing, whereas guilt compared to shame involves more empathetic processing, and provided evidence that the distinction between shame and guilt could occur in an early stage.

The effect of shame on anger at others: awareness of the emotion-causing events matters.

Numerous studies have found that shame increases individuals' anger at others. However, according to recent theories about the social function of shame and anger at others, it is possible that shame controls individuals' anger at others in specific conditions. We replicated previous findings that shame increased individuals' anger at others' unfairness, when others were not aware of the individual's experience of shameful events. We also found for the first time that shame controlled or even decreased individuals' anger at others' unfairness, when others were aware of the individual's experience of shameful events. The results were consistent when shame was induced by either a recall paradigm or an imagination paradigm, and in either the ultimatum game or the dictator game. This suggests that shame strategically controls individuals' anger at others to demonstrate that they are willing to benefit others, when facing the risk of social exclusion. Our findings highlight the interpersonal function of shame and deepen the understanding of the relationship between shame and anger at others.

Differentiating guilt and shame in an interpersonal context with univariate activation and multivariate pattern analyses.

Guilt and shame are usually evoked during interpersonal interactions. However, no study has compared guilt and shame processing under such circumstances. In the present study, we investigated guilt and shame in an interpersonal context using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Behaviorally, participants reported more "guilt" when their wrong advice caused a confederate's economic loss, whereas they reported more "shame" when their wrong advice were correctly refused by the confederate. The fMRI results showed that both guilt and shame activated regions related to the integration of theory of mind and self-referential information (dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, dmPFC) and to the emotional processing (anterior insula). Guilt relative to shame activated regions linked with theory of mind (supramarginal gyrus and temporo-parietal junction) and cognitive control (orbitofrontal cortex/ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). Shame relative to guilt revealed no significant results. Using multivariate pattern analysis, we demonstrated that in addition to the regions found in the univariate activation analysis, the ventral anterior cingulate cortex and dmPFC could also distinguish guilt and shame. These results do not only echo previous studies of guilt and shame using recall and imagination paradigms but also provide new insights into the psychological and neural mechanisms of guilt and shame.

Corrigendum: Stimulating the Right Temporoparietal Junction with tDCS Decreases Deception in Moral Hypocrisy and Unfairness.

[This corrects the article on p. 2033 in vol. 8, PMID: 29218025.].

Stimulating the Right Temporoparietal Junction with tDCS Decreases Deception in Moral Hypocrisy and Unfairness.

Self-centered and other-regarding concerns play important roles in decisions of deception. To investigate how these two motivations affect deception in fairness related moral hypocrisy, we modulated the brain activity in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), the key region for decision making involved in self-centered and other-regarding concerns. After receiving brain stimulation with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), participants finished a modified dictator game. In the game, they played as proposers to make allocations between themselves and recipients and had a chance to deceive by misreporting their totals for allocations. Results show that deception in moral hypocrisy was decreased after anodal stimulation than sham and cathodal stimulation, only when participants know that their reported totals (appearing fair) would be revealed to recipients rather than being unrevealed. Anodal stimulation also increased offers to recipients than cathodal stimulation regardless of the revelation of reported totals. These findings suggest that enhancing the activity of rTPJ decreased deception caused by impression management rather than self-deception in moral hypocrisy and unfairness through facilitating other-regarding concerns and weakening non-material self-centered motivations. They provide causal evidence for the role of rTPJ in both other-regarding concerns and non-material self-centered motivations, shedding light on the way to decrease moral hypocrisy.

Neural substrates of context- and person-dependent altruistic punishment.

Human altruistic behaviors are heterogeneous across both contexts and people, whereas the neural signatures underlying the heterogeneity remain to be elucidated. To address this issue, we examined the neural signatures underlying the context- and person-dependent altruistic punishment, conjoining event-related fMRI with both task-based and resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC). Acting as an impartial third party, participants decided how to punish norm violators either alone or in the presence of putative others. We found that the presence of others decreased altruistic punishment due to diffusion of responsibility. Those behavioral effects paralleled altered neural responses in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and putamen. Further, we identified modulation of responsibility diffusion on task-based functional connectivity of dACC with the brain regions implicated in reward processing (i.e., posterior cingulate cortex and amygdala/orbital frontal cortex). Finally, the RSFC results revealed that (i) increased intrinsic connectivity strengths of the putamen with temporoparietal junction and dorsolateral PFC were associated with attenuated responsibility diffusion in altruistic punishment and (ii) increased putamen-dorsomedial PFC connectivity strengths were associated with reduced responsibility diffusion in self-reported responsibility. Taken together, our findings elucidate the context- and person-dependent altruistic behaviors as well as associated neural substrates and thus provide a potential neurocognitive mechanism of heterogeneous human altruistic behaviors. Hum Brain Mapp 38:5535-5550, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Self-Punishment Promotes Forgiveness in the Direct and Indirect Reciprocity Contexts.

Most previous studies regarding self-punishment have focused on the correlation between moral emotion and self-punishment. Only a few studies have attempted to understand self-punishment from the perspective of seeking forgiveness, and no study has yet directly tested whether wrongdoers' self-punishment promotes others to forgive the wrongdoers. In three studies, the participants judged the wrongdoers' self-punishment behaviors following an unfair allocation and reported the extent to which they forgave the wrongdoers. The results demonstrated that self-punishment did promote forgiveness in both the direct (Studies 1 and 2) and indirect reciprocity (Study 3) contexts. Consistent with costly signaling theory, the costlier the self-punishment was, the stronger the effect it had on forgiveness. Moreover, communicative self-punishment had a better effect than silent self-punishment when the cost was relatively high in the direct-reciprocity studies. These findings can guide us regarding how to address a damaged relationship via self-punishment when compensation is not feasible or acceptable.