Posts tagged altruism
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Brain Structure of Kidney Donors May Make Them More Altruistic
That’s the finding of a study published in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Georgetown researchers.
Georgetown College psychology professor Abigail Marsh worked with John VanMeter, director of Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging at Georgetown University Medical Center, to scan the brains of 19 altruistic kidney donors.
More Sensitive to Distress
“The results of brain scans and behavioral testing suggests that these donors have some structural and functional brain differences that may make them more sensitive, on average, to other people’s distress,” Marsh explains.
The Georgetown researchers used functional MRI to record the neural activity of the kidney donors and 20 control subjects who had never donated an organ as they viewed faces with fearful, angry or neutral expressions.
Underlying Neural Basis
In the right amygdala, an emotion-sensitive brain region, altruists displayed greater neural activity while viewing fearful expressions than did control subjects.
When asked to identify the emotional expressions presented in the face images, altruists recognized fearful facial expressions relatively more accurately than the control subjects.
“The brain scans revealed that the right amygdala volume of altruists is larger than that of non-altruists,” Marsh says. “The findings suggest that individual differences in altruism may have an underlying neural basis.”
Opposite From Psychopaths?
These findings dovetail with previous research by the professor showing structural and functional brain differences that appear to make people with psychopathic traits less sensitive to others’ fear and distress.
These differences include amygdalas that are smaller and less responsive to fearful expressions. People who are unusually altruistic may therefore be the opposite in some ways from people who are psychopathic.
To find kidney donors, the researchers reached out to the Washington Regional Transplant Community (WRTC), a federally designated organ procurement organizations.
A Donor’s Story
Harold Mintz, former northern Virginian who volunteered with WRTC and agreed to participate in the Georgetown study, donated a kidney to an anonymous stranger he later learned was an Ethiopian refugee who had settled in Washington, D.C.
Mintz, who now lives in California and speaks to high school students about his 2000 donation, says a series of events over time led him to supply the kidney, including his father dying of cancer diagnosed too late at the age of 56.
One Valentine’s Day in 1988, Mintz and his wife were shopping separately for presents and Mintz noticed parents in a mall with a sign saying “Please Save Our Daughter’s Life.” He walked past them, then turned around and asked what they needed. It turned out the daughter had leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant.
The couple decided to forget about the holiday and donated blood to see if either of them were a match. But no match was found and Mintz later noticed the daughter’s obituary in the newspaper.
Stories Taken to Heart
Mintz also was surprised to hear that although the couple’s daughter had just died, they thanked everyone who tried to help and expressed hope that they might help someone else.
“All these stories just kind of stuck inside my head and every time I’d see a story about a medical story of distress, it would just kind of get put away in a file inside my heart,” Mintz says.
Marsh notes that kidney disease is now the eighth-leading cause of death in the U.S., and that living kidney donations are the best hope for restoring people to health who have kidney disease.
“Dr. Marsh’s work is a great example of how fMRI can be used to provide insight into how differences in the brain’s response can lead individuals to perform such magnanimous acts,” VanMeter says.
Altruism connected to size of grey matter
What makes a person altruistic? Philosophers throughout the ages often pondered the question but failed to get concrete answers. New research from the University of Zurich in Switzerland shows that the answer may lie in our brains, or more accurately, that the volume of a small brain region can influences one’s predisposition for altruistic behaviour. The results, presented in the journal Neuron, indicate that individuals who behave more altruistically than others have more grey matter at the junction between the parietal and temporal lobe. This shows for the very first time that there is a connection between brain anatomy, brain activity and altruistic behaviour.
Contary to past studies that showed that social categories like gender, income or education cannot fully explain differences in altruistic behaviour, recent research in the area of neuroscience have demonstrated that differences in brain structure might be linked to differences in personality traits and abilities. Now, for the first time, a team of researchers from the University of Zurich, headed by Ernst Fehr, the director of the Department of Economics, demonstrates that there is a connection between brain anatomy and altruistic behaviour.
For their study, the researchers asked volunteers to divide money between themselves and someone else who was anonymous. The participants always had the option of sacrificing a certain portion of the money for the benefit of the other person. The monetary sacrifice was considered to be altruistic because it helped someone else at one’s own expense. The researchers found major differences in this respect: some participants were almost never willing to sacrifice money to benefit others while others behaved very altruistically.
Previous studies showed that the place where the parietal and temporal lobes meet is linked to the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes in order to understand their thoughts and feelings, an ability the researchers considered closely related to altruism.
So the team hypothesised that individual differences in this part of the brain might be linked to differences in altruistic behaviour. And, according to Yosuke Morishima, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich, they were right: ‘People who behaved more altruistically also had a higher proportion of grey matter at the junction between the parietal and temporal lobes.’
The researchers also discovered that the subjects displayed marked differences in brain activity while they were deciding how to split up the money. In the case of selfish people, the small brain region behind the ear is already active when the cost of altruistic behaviour is very low. In altruistic people, however, this brain region only becomes more active when the cost is very high. The brain region is activated especially strongly when people reach the limits of their willingness to behave altruistically. The reason, the researchers suspect, is that this is when there is the greatest need to overcome man’s natural self-centeredness by activating this brain region.
Said Dr Fehr: ‘These are exciting results for us. However, one should not jump to the conclusion that altruistic behaviour is determined by biological factors alone.’
It appears that the volume of grey matter can also be influenced by social processes. According to Dr Fehr, the findings therefore raise the question as to whether it is possible to promote the development of brain regions that are important for altruistic behaviour through training or social norms.
(Source: cordis.europa.eu)