Prosocial behavior (PSB) is a behavior that an individual engages in that is beneficial to others or society and is one of the most complex behaviors that social animals (including humans) can exhibit.
The ability of individuals to meet the needs of others through different forms of prosocial behavior is essential for population survival and social cohesion. An important form of pro-social behavior is helping behavior, which manifests itself by taking targeted actions to help others achieve specific goals. This is in contrast to other forms of pro-social behavior (e.g., comforting behavior) that have the primary purpose of providing emotional support.
Although previous research has shown that humans and animals are able to perceive the states and needs of other individuals, how individuals engage in targeted helping behaviors in response to the specific needs and goals of others and the neural mechanisms underlying them remain unclear. While these helping behaviors require individuals to be able to recognize the states and needs of others, they are of limited value to individuals who are in need if bystanders simply understand the needs of others without taking action to help. How does helping behavior occur? How is it encoded and modulated in neural networks? The neurobiological mechanisms underlying these behavioral processes are not clear.
On January 24, 2024, a research team from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) published a research paper in Nature entitled "Cortical regulation of helping behavior towards others in pain".
Using mice as model organisms, the study provides insights into helping behavior among animals and reveals important neurobiological mechanisms in the brain that encode and control this behavior.
In previous studies, the team found that mice can exhibit pro-social allogrooming behavior to provide emotional support to a companion that has experienced negative stimuli and is in an anxious state. Building on this finding, the team further discovered that mice can exhibit targeted helping behavior toward a companion in pain—the mice will lick their companion's injured body parts to help them cope with the pain. This helping behavior is referred to by the authors as targeted allolicking. It is elicited by localized pain and injury in other mice and can reduce the need for injured individuals to lick their own wounds. This helping behavior is widespread in the animal kingdom. The authors' study provides conclusive evidence that mice are able to sense the specific needs of individuals in pain and help other mice cope with the pain through targeted allolicking. This lays the foundation for studying the neurobiological mechanisms underlying this behavior.
Using this behavioral model, the team delved into the role of the cortical region Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) in encoding the pain state of other individuals and in regulating this helping behavior. The authors found that individual neurons and overall neural activity in the ACC were able to encode pain states in other individuals and were significantly different from neural responses to normal states in other individuals. In addition, there are different neurons in the ACC that are involved in encoding two different forms of pro-social behavior: targeted allolicking for localized pain in other individuals and allogrooming for other individuals. These findings provide new insights into how ACC perceives different forms of negative states in other individuals and modulates different pro-social behaviors depending on the context. Interestingly, similar to the findings of this study, past research using EEG has found that comforting and helping behaviors exhibited by human toddlers are also associated with different patterns of neural activity.
Finally, the research team provided functional evidence of the causal role of ACC neurons in controlling this helping behavior through optogenetics and chemical genetics. The study found that inhibition of ACC neurons leads to reduced allolicking, while activation of the ACC enhances allolicking behavior directed at the site of injury.
Little is known about the intriguing issue of neural coding and regulation of helping behavior, so this finding has important implications. These findings provide key insights into the neural mechanisms by which animals perceive the specific states and needs of other individuals and exhibit pro-social behaviors, and they open new research directions for the study of the neural mechanisms of pro-social behavior.
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