Brain Activity Difference during Watching Social Behavior Helping Other People

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.