Abstract

Despite extensive research on the effects of stress on the brain and behaviors, there is a debate whether stress promotes prosocial behaviors, especially acute stress due to intricate costly punishment in the ultimatum game. Therefore, the present study introduced an irrelevant third party to examine how acute stress and the triggered cortisol influence third parties’ punishing and helping behaviors as more convincing altruistic behaviors. The 65 participants were exposed to a psychosocial stressor (n = 33) or a control condition (n = 32). Afterwards, two third-party intervention tasks (a token allocation task and criminal scenario judgment task) were completed, during which the participants, as an “irrelevant” third party, could choose whether to sacrifice their own interests to help the victim or punish the transgressor. Participants’ affective states, heart rate, and salivary cortisol were repeatedly measured throughout the experiment. Results showed that acute stress can lead to more third-party helping behaviors but not more punishing behaviors. Specifically, participants under stress tended to transfer more monetary units to the victim in the token allocation task than the control-group participants, and they tended to help the victim in the scenario task. In contrast, there was no significant difference in punishing behavior between the stressed and control participants. These findings reveal that acute psychosocial stress triggers the “tend and befriend” response, which might reflect the prosocial intuition under acute stress.

摘要

尽管对压力对大脑和行为的影响进行了广泛的研究，但对于压力是否会促进亲社会行为，尤其是由于最后通牒游戏中复杂的代价高昂的惩罚引起的急性压力，存在争议。因此，本研究引入了一个无关的第三方来研究急性压力和触发的皮质醇如何影响第三方作为更令人信服的利他行为的惩罚和帮助行为。65 名参与者暴露于心理社会压力源 ( n  = 33) 或控制条件 ( n = 32）。随后，完成了两个第三方干预任务（代币分配任务和犯罪场景判断任务），参与者作为“无关”的第三方，可以选择是牺牲自己的利益来帮助受害者还是惩罚受害者。违者。在整个实验过程中，参与者的情感状态、心率和唾液皮质醇被反复测量。结果表明，急性压力会导致更多的第三方帮助行为，但不会导致更多的惩罚行为。具体来说，与对照组参与者相比，处于压力下的参与者倾向于在代币分配任务中向受害者转移更多的货币单位，并且他们倾向于在场景任务中帮助受害者。相比之下，压力参与者和控制参与者之间的惩罚行为没有显着差异。这些研究结果表明，急性心理社会压力会触发“倾向于和成为朋友”的反应，这可能反映了急性压力下的亲社会直觉。