Here ’s How The Brain Responds When We Feel Our Parents’ Joy

By Emma Young You scrape off the panels on a lottery scratch card… and you’re a winner! Brain imaging would show a burst of activity in a region called the nucleus accumbens, in the ventral striatum, a region known to code the impact of reward-related stimuli, such as getting money. But how the brain handles so-called vicarious joy — the type you might feel if you scraped winning panels from a relative’s scratch card, or even a stranger’s — is not well understood. Now a new study, published in Cognitive, Affective & Behavioural Neuroscience, shows that while there are similarities, there are also some important differences. Notably, the participants’ brains responded differently when they won money for their mother versus their father. Philip Bradner at Erasmus University in the Netherlands led the study of 30 mostly undergraduate students, with an average age of 22. They all had a mother and a father as their parents, and none had a history of mental health issues. (In fact, they were deliberately chosen to be similar, to make for a more homogenous sample.) While in an fMRI scanner, the participants played a simple game in which they, or one other person, could win money. In each trial, this other “player” was identified as either their mother, father, or simply as a “stranger”. All the participants had to do was click a button to choose which of two animated curtains to open. This revealed a small win for themselves an...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Emotion Source Type: blogs