Brain Activity Difference during Watching Social Behavior Helping Other People

Abstract

Sympathy for helping other people influences motivation and performance in communication tasks and collaborative work. To promote interactive sympathy within a team, this study aims to elucidate the relationship between moral consciousness and self-construal inclination by measuring brain activity. In our experiment, participants watch video stimuli, which display moral-related scenes involving helping/disturbing behavior. We found the moral consciousness of feeling good impression was associated with the significant decrement of brain activities in the left-region, particularly dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and Broca’s area. For the participants who had inclination of interdependent self-construal, brain activity decreased significantly in the left-region during watching helping behavior. This finding holds potential for assessing objectively social tendencies based on cultural and value diversity by measuring prefrontal cortex.