The effect of transcranial direct current stimulation in medial prefrontal cortex on the gratitude of heterogeneous individual
Gratitude is an important aspect of human sociality,which leads to benefits for both mental health and interpersonal relationships.It is thus important to elucidate the neural mechanism of gratitude,which are only now beginning to be investigated.To this end,the study verifies the specificity of medial prefrontal cortex(mPFC)engaged in gratitude of heterogeneous individuals using transcranial direct current stimulation(tDCS)technique.Previous neural studies showed that mPFC involved in social cognition and value evaluation were closely related to gratitude.However,the causal relationship between this neural area and gratitude has not been fully revealed.And the effect of individual social heterogeneity is ignored,while behavioral economics studies suggested that abilities of employees in labor market would affect their feeling of gratitude and emotional response.Thus,we designed an experiment based on the gift exchange game to further investigate the relationship between mPFC and gratitude of heterogeneous employees.Before the experiment,participants were asked to form the self-cognition about their ability through an appropriately difficult task.We then used the effort of participants to imply their gratitude and analyzed effort levels of employees with different abilities under anodal,cathodal,and sham stimulation.We found that employees under anodal stimulation were significantly likely to exert more effort than those under sham stimulation,with cathodal stimulated employees ranking at the bottom of list.Moreover,the effort level of employees with low ability was obviously higher than that of high ability employees.Cathodal stimulation on mPFC significantly reduced the effort level of low ability employees,whereas anodal tDCS stimulation on mPFC increased the effort level of high ability employees.We found the relationship between mPFC and gratitude using tDCS,and provided neural evidence for incentive mechanism design in labor market to a certain extent.
tDCS mPFC Gratitude Social Heterogeneity Gift Exchange Game
Pengcheng Wang Guangrong Wang Xiaofei Niu Huiliang Shang Jianbiao Li
Business School,Tianjin University of Economic and Finance;Selten Laboratory,Nankai University,Tianj Selten Laboratory,Nankai University,Tianjin,PR China;Neural Decision Science Laboratory,Weifang Univ China Academy of Corporate Governance,Nankai University;Selten Laboratory,Nankai University,Tianjin, Selten Laboratory,Nankai University,Tianjin,PR China
国内会议
天津
英文
1-21
2017-10-28（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）