Effects Of Hunger On Prosocial Behavior And Its Neural Basis

Hunger is an unpleasant or painful feeling caused by the lack of nutrients.It is also considered as a motivational state that governs behavior due to unsatisfied physiological needs.As a stable and periodic physiological signal,hunger acts as a driving power for human to obtain energy resources,which ensures human's survival and development.At the same time,since human beings have realized development and evolution on the basis of cooperation and reciprocity,and have formed relevant social norms.This process has been accompanied by the self-interest tendency of hunger for a long time,so human beings need to evolve corresponding coordinated mechanism to balance the conflict between hunger and prosociality.The purpose of this study is to understand the interaction and coordination process between the selfishness of hunger and human prosociality.Previous studies have found that hunger has wide-ranging effects on human's psychology and behavior,but the evidence is inconsistent and the explanation is controversial.Recent studies suggest that hunger does not always affect prosocial behavior.Hunger does not reduce prosocial behavior in interdependent situations,but it reduces prosocial behavior in non-interdependent situations.In this study,the relationship between hunger and prosocial behavior was investigated in two situations.Meanwhile,differences in brain activation were recorded by using f NIRS,and neuroscientific evidence was sought to explain the possible zero effect of hunger on prosocial behavior through neuroimaging.This paper reviews the research on the psychological and behavioral effects of hunger andx the neural mechanisms of prosocial behavior.In the first study,we examined the relationship between hunger and prosocial behavior in the form of a questionnaire,and examined the effect of hunger on support for social norms.Results show that the hunger in SVO and dictator game will improve a person's personal benefits,there are more individualistic orientation,and significantly predict the support of social norms,but did not differ between groups,will not more willing to participate in volunteer tasks without reward experiment or spend more time,suggests that hunger in different situation and task type affect social attitudes and behavior.In the second study,we experimented to investigate the behavioral responses and brain activation of hungry individuals in interdependent situations(UG)and non-interdependent situations(DG).Consistent with the previous results,the behavioral results showed no significant difference in the amount of money proposed to each other in the economic assignment task between the hunger and control groups.f NIRS results showed that there was general activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex(r DLPFC)and orbitofrontal cortex(OFC)in the ultimatum game,while there was activation in the frontal pole region(FPC)in the starvation group.In the dictator game,there was activation of OFC in the hungry group,which was higher than that in the control group.FNIRS presents different activation patterns under different conditions.In UG,additional activation of FPC of hungry subjects suggests that there may be stronger cognitive control in the prefrontal cortex to suppress the dominant response(self-interested behavior)during starvation.In DG,the activation pattern of DLPFC and FPC in the hunger group and the control group were opposite,and the hunger group tended to be negatively activated.PFC reduced the message in the condition of hunger,the tendency to suppress control,may lead to reduced individual cooperative,while r DLPFC negative activation may make the individual self-interest in DG without threatening penalties tend to decrease,and this is consistency,the study suggests FPC and DLPFC may jointly participate in prosocial behavior of hungry subjects,and lead to the zero effect.This study first used f NIRS to explore the relation between hunger and prosocial behavior,which results that in hunger condition,PFC can reduce self-interest behavior in dependent task by stronger activation.In independent task,PFC and FPC jointly make subject to remain prosociality.This study has obtained preliminary findings on this problem,and further research is needed.