Individual's Emotional State Affecting Behavior And Brain Responses During Charitable Donation

Charitable donations,as a costly altruistic behavior,require individuals to trade off the cost-benefit before making altruistic decisions.So far,researchers have mainly focused on the altruistic motivation and the underlying cognitive neural mechanisms.Fewer studies have explored the cognitive neural mechanisms of the charitable donations in different emotional states.Besides,how do people process different types of donation materials is unclear.Therefore,we design two experiments to explore these issues.Study 1: We use different types of pictures to induce individual positive/ negative/ neutral emotional state,then subjects need to choose the donation amount according to the donation cue(prevention or saving).The behavioral results show that subjects choose the higher amount in negative emotional state;and facing to the saving cue,they also donate more.In ERP results,regardless of presenting different donation cues,individuals in the negative emotional state show a larger prefrontal negative wave in 280-350 ms,indicating that compared to positive/neutral state,subjects in negative state might pay more cognitive resource to processing charitable information.The correlation analysis indicated that in negative emotion priming,the greater N3 amplitude in processing the donation cue,the more subjects will donate.We conclude that,individual in negative emotional state will donate more and the prefrontal region plays a key role on processing the donation cue and making donation decision.Study 2: Based on study 1,we aim to explore why people will donate more in negative emotion state.Except for adding ERP component about the empathy factor;we also measure the subjective pleasure ratings and self-report about the donation motive in different emotional states.The behavioral results show that the individual donation amount in the negative emotional state is more;facing with painful picture,donation amount is also more;besides,compared with the negative emotions,positive individuals report more pleasure rating and making donation more due to warm glow than empathy-altruism motive.In ERP results,although there is the main effect of pain empathy on early processing and late processing,the difference was not significant under positive and negative emotional conditions,indicating that the previous emotional initiation don't affect the automatic neural response of pain empathy pictures.The neural response to the painful empathy picture doesn't explain the more donation amount under negative emotions.The reason may be that the donation behavior may be involved with other components of empathy,such as cognitive empathy and so on.In study 2,the hints about charitable donation cue are not significant under different conditions.The result of failing to repeat study 1 may be due to the fact that painful images consumes too much psychological resources and affects processing next cue.In general,the results of study 2 show that in a positive emotional state,individual may be warm-glow motive to make charitable donation behavior,while in a negative emotional state,individual may make a charitable donation behavior based on empathy-altruistic motivation.All in all,Study 1 and 2 found that negative emotional state increases individual charitable donation,and the participants donate more after viewing painful picture,indicating that the pain picture also induces negative emotion,thus affecting people's prosocial behavior.The integration of the two experiments also found that the saving cue relative to prevention cue also make the subject donate more.Therefore,the results of this study demonstrate that donations are affected by both subjective emotional state factors and objective victim information.And negative emotions increase donor behavior may be due to empathy-altruistic motive,not to release negative emotion.