Everyday prosociality includes helping behaviors such as holding doors or giving directions that are spontaneous and low-cost and are performed frequently by the average person. Such behaviors promote a wide array of positive outcomes that include increased well-being, trust, and social capital, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support these behaviors are not yet well understood. Whereas costly altruistic responding to others' distress is associated with elevated reactivity in the amygdala, we hypothesized that everyday prosociality would be more closely associated with activation in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), a region of the extended amygdala known for its roles in maintaining vigilance for relevant socio-affective environmental cues and in supporting parental care. One previous study of the neural correlates of everyday prosociality highlighted a functional cluster identified as the septal area but which overlapped with established coordinates of BNST. We used an anatomical mask of BNST (Torrisi et al., 2015) to evaluate the association of BNST activation and daily helping in a sample of 25 adults recruited from the community as well as 23 adults who had engaged in acts of extraordinary altruism. Results found that activation in left BNST during an empathy task predicted everyday helping over a subsequent 14-day period in both samples. BNST activation most strongly predicted helping strangers and proactive helping. We conclude that beyond facilitating care for offspring, activation in BNST may provide a basis for the motivation to engage in a broad array of everyday helping behaviors.

中文翻译：

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终末纹（BNST）在床核中的激活对应于日常帮助。

日常的亲密关系包括帮助行为，例如自发且低成本的上门或发出指示，并由普通人频繁执行。此类行为可促进各种积极结果，包括增加幸福感，信任度和社会资本，但是支持这些行为的认知和神经机制尚未得到很好的理解。昂贵的利他对他人痛苦的反应与杏仁核的反应性升高有关，但我们假设，日常亲社会性与终末纹（BNST）床核的激活更为紧密相关，该核是终末杏仁核的一个区域，在保持对相关社会情感环境线索的警惕和支持父母护理方面的作用。先前对日常亲社会性的神经相关性的一项研究强调了一个功能性集群，该集群被确定为中隔区，但与已建立的BNST坐标重叠。我们使用了BNST的解剖面罩（Torrisi等人，2015）来评估BNST激活与日常帮助之间的关联，该样本来自社区招募的25名成年人以及从事非凡利他行为的23名成年人。结果发现，在两个样本中，移情任务期间左BNST的激活预测在随后的14天内每天都会提供帮助。BNST激活最有力地预示了对陌生人的帮助和积极的帮助。我们得出的结论是，除了促进对后代的照料外，BNST的激活还可能为从事多种日常帮助行为的动机提供基础。