New discovery! Altruistic behavior can effectively reduce the body pain!

January 16, 2020 / BIOON / -- recently, in a research report entitled "authentic behaviors related physical pain" published in PNAS, scientists from Peking University and other institutions found that compared with other groups, people who participate in altruistic behaviors may feel less pain Source: Yilu Wang, et al PNAs, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1911861117 In previous studies, researchers have found that altruistic behavior (such as being good to others and expecting no return) or making people feel better can promote the production of chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine, which can improve the good feeling of the body; now researchers have found that altruistic behavior can help reduce the body The pain Altruism has been widely valued by human society From prehistory to civilization, altruism can promote the sharing and cooperation between human beings, and also enable group members to survive all kinds of crises, such as video However, participating in altruistic behavior is very expensive for oneself, for example, individuals will sacrifice their resources, including time, money and food, which will reduce their adaptability and comfort compared with other people There are research reports that altruistic behaviors, such as voluntary activities and philanthropy, will have a positive impact on the mental health of the body, so how can these seemingly contradictory results be achieved? What is the mechanism that expensive altruistic behavior is beneficial to the implementer? In life-threatening emergencies, these problems may become very interesting; intuitively, altruism does not seem to be an adaptive choice behavior, on the contrary, human beings can maximize their survival opportunities by accumulating a lot of resources for themselves However, empirical evidence shows that human altruism will actually increase in critical times, such as After an earthquake, the residents in the affected area will be more "Pro social" than those in the less damaged or undamaged areas In the case of life-threatening, the popularity of altruism raises an important but little-known problem, that is, what happens in the heart of a person when he provides help? The current research thinks that participating in altruistic behavior may affect the feeling of unpleasant stimulation, such as body pain; in order to further study how altruistic behavior affects body pain, the researchers conducted four experiments In the first experiment, the researchers asked people who donated blood after the earthquake to evaluate the pain degree of needles, and then they asked The researchers found that after the earthquake, people who donated blood as volunteers said that the degree of injury caused by needles was less (that is, their pain perception decreased) In the second experiment, volunteers were asked to help revise some migrant children's Manuals in a cold environment The researchers found that volunteers who did not voluntarily revise the manual felt less uncomfortable with the cold environment than those who did not In a third trial, the researchers compared the behavioral differences between cancer patients who cooked and cleaned for others and similar patients who only cooked and cleaned for themselves, and found that participants who helped others reported less pain in their bodies In the last experiment, the researchers asked volunteers to donate money for orphans The volunteers were also asked how much they thought their donation could help the orphans Then each volunteer was scanned by MRI after receiving the shock The researchers said that compared with those who refused to donate, those who donated money responded to the shock It was slower, and the more volunteers felt that the money they donated could help the orphans, the less their brains responded to the shock After the four experiments, the researchers said that when their results were combined with other research results, they could find that altruistic behavior not only makes them feel good, but also significantly reduces the body's pain feeling The results of this study show that altruism can slow down the unpleasant feelings of the body, such as the pain of the body, in terms of behavior and neurology, under the adverse conditions (such as when the body is threatened) Although most previous theories and studies have emphasized the long-term and indirect benefits of altruism, the current research shows that participants may immediately benefit from altruism under painful conditions, and relevant research findings provide further evidence for the current theory The researchers found that the non delayed harvest may be adaptive to survival, because it can make healthy and sick people maintain a positive physical feeling when the body and emotions are threatened; the research believes that the personal cost of helping others may alleviate the pain of the performer of altruistic behavior in unpleasant conditions, which also helps the researchers to To understand altruistic behavior comprehensively and deeply The researchers said that altruistic behavior can not only alleviate the acute body pain of healthy adults, but also relieve the chronic pain of cancer patients In this paper, functional magnetic resonance imaging technology was used to study, and they found that when people carry out altruistic behavior, the response activity of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral insula areas to painful shock was significantly reduced The decrease of pain induced activation in the right insula is mediated by the neural activity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, while the activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is positively related to the experience and experience of the participants themselves from altruistic behavior Of course, later researchers need to conduct more in-depth research to clarify the mystery Reference: Yilu Wang, Jianqiao Ge, Hanqi Zhang, et al Authentic behaviors related physical pain, PNAs, December 302019, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1911861117