RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 The human brain views selfish behaviour towards genetic vs. non-genetic sibling differently
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 112383
DO 10.1101/112383
A1 Mareike Bacha-Trams
A1 Enrico Glerean
A1 Juha Lahnakoski
A1 Elisa Ryyppö
A1 Mikko Sams
A1 Iiro P. Jääskeläinen
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/28/112383.abstract
AB Previous behavioural studies have shown that humans act more altruistically towards kin. Whether and how such kinship preference translates into differential neurocognitive evaluation of social interactions has remained an open question. Here, we investigated how the human brain is engaged when viewing a moral dilemma between genetic vs. non-genetic sisters. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, a movie depicting refusal of organ donation between two sisters was shown, with participants guided to believe the sisters were related either genetically or by adoption. The participants selfreported that genetic relationship was not relevant to them, yet their brain activity told a different story. When the participants believed that the sisters were genetically related, inter-subject similarity of brain activity was significantly stronger in areas supporting response-conflict resolution, emotion regulation, and self-referential social cognition. Our results show that mere knowledge of a genetic relationship between interacting persons can robustly modulate social cognition of the perceiver.