Xie Xiaofei's group revealed altrual behavior to relieve physical pain.

Helping others is often accompanied by the consumption of self resources, but it can improve the health and happiness of the helper.why does this seemingly contradictory phenomenon happen? Understanding this issue is becoming more and more important in the context of life and death.intuitively speaking, altruistic behaviors is not an adaptive choice. Individuals can maximize their own interests by storing and retaining resources. However, facts show that altruistic behaviors often emerge in large numbers when crises break out.what is the impact of altruistic behavior at cost on the helper's own physiological and psychological processes? On December 30, 2019, PNAs published online the paper "academic behaviors relief physical pain" by Professor Xie Xiaofei, School of psychology and cognitive science, Peking University.this study found that altruistic behavior can alleviate the physiological pain of helpers, and preliminarily revealed the neural mechanism of this effect.this study suggests that altruistic behavior may affect helpers' perception of unpleasant stimuli (such as physiological pain).one possibility is that altruistic behavior can enhance pain experience, because altruistic behavior means one-way payment of time, energy, money and other resources, and tangible losses are painful and disgusting; however, another possibility is that altruistic behavior can bring invisible benefits through enhancing psychological process, and play a buffer role in helping people's physiological pain.this study supports the latter hypothesis.firstly, altruistic behavior was observed in the field study of Ya'an earthquake. The blood donors' subjective perception of blood drawing pain was significantly lower than that of physical examinees.subsequently, the researchers found that subjects who voluntarily altruistic (revising a reading material for the children of migrant workers) reported lower pain levels in the cold pressure pain paradigm than those who did not know that the revision of the reading material was for the purpose of helping others, compared with those who did not know that the revision was for the purpose of helping others.the next experimental study used the tourniquet paradigm to simulate the pain caused by ischemia.the subjects completed two tourniquet tests and were asked to fill in a questionnaire during the break.half of the randomly assigned subjects learned that they had won a donation of 10 yuan for the earthquake stricken area by filling in the questionnaire and put the money into the donation box by themselves (altruistic group); the other half of the subjects learned that they had earned an extra 10 yuan reward for themselves (control group).that is to say, the behavior of all subjects is exactly the same, and the difference is only in the meaning of the behavior.the results showed that the pain level of altruistic group was significantly lower than that of control group in the second tourniquet test, indicating that donating money to disaster areas can relieve pain (Fig. 1).Fig. 1, the changes of pain scores in tourniquet task of altruistic group and control group over time. This study further explored the neural mechanism of altruistic pain relief.the subjects were informed that two unrelated experiments were conducted in the MRI. in each trial, first make a choice of altruism or control, and then receive an electric shock of different intensity on the back of the right hand, and report the pain degree by pressing the key. altruistic choice is to decide whether to pay some cost to win higher donation for orphans, and the control choice is to judge whether the nature of the two lines is consistent. the results showed that compared with the control choice, the neural activity of vmPFC was significantly increased, while the activity of brain regions related to pain processing (such as anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral insula) was significantly decreased, which confirmed the decrease of pain from the level of neural activity. vmPFC is closely related to the experience of sense of meaning. The activation of vmPFC plays a mediating role in the relationship between altruistic behavior and the activation degree of pain brain regions, which indicates that the sense of meaning obtained from altruistic behavior can relieve pain (Fig. 2-4). Figure 2, fMRI experimental process. Finally, the researchers selected patients with lung cancer of stage 4 or above in a hospital in Hebei Province for one week intervention: the cancer patients in the experimental group cleaned the public area for their patients every day, and participated in a dietary nutrition sharing meeting to prepare recipes for the patients; the patients in the control group cleaned themselves up every day and participated in the theme of dietary nutrition lecture. although there was no difference in the initial pain level between the altruistic group and the control group, the degree of pain reduction in the altruistic group was significantly greater than that in the control group with the progress of individual and group activities. this study improves the understanding of human altruistic behavior, reveals that altruistic behavior can make helpers obtain immediate benefits, help individuals cope with threatened situations, and provide a low-cost and no side-effect thinking for pain management. it is reported that Wang Yilu, a doctoral student of Professor Xie Xiaofei's research group, and Dr. Ge Jianqiao, Mr. research center of Frontier Interdisciplinary Research Institute, are the co first authors, Professor Xie Xiaofei is the corresponding author of this paper, and the graduates of the research group, Dr. Zhang Hanqi and Wang Haixia, as co authors, have made important contributions to the research. Wang, Y., Ge, J., Zhang, H., Wang, H., & amp; Xie, X. academic behaviors relievephysical pain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America