Daily Family Assistance and Behavioral and Neural Associations of Giving to Others
Poster No:
844
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Jasmine Hernandez1, Maira Karan1, Lee Lazar1, Naomi Eisenberger1, Adriana Galván1, Andrew Fuligni1
Institutions:
1UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Introduction:
Family assistance is an essential aspect of family relationships across cultures and contexts exemplified by caring for siblings, running errands, and providing emotional and financial support (Telzer et al., 2010). Family assistance is associated with positive aspects of psychological well-being and giving towards others (Armstrong‐Carter & Telzer, 2021). A few studies have suggested an increased differentiation of giving more to familiar others, including the family, than strangers in adolescence (Karan et al., 2022, van de Groep et al., 2022). It is possible that daily family assistance promotes giving behavior towards the family and that youth who report more daily family assistance exhibit increased giving towards family in comparison to others. At the neural level, giving resources to family at a loss to oneself has been linked with neural activation in regions implicated in cognitive control, social cognition, and reward processing, which undergo significant change during adolescence (Karan et al. 2022). The current study examined the extent to which daily family assistance is associated with adolescents giving resources to others – family, friends, and strangers – at a cost to themselves while imaging brain activation in key regions associated with prosocial behavior in a fMRI scanner. We hypothesized that daily family assistance will be associated with more giving towards caregivers at a cost to oneself in comparison to giving to others, and concomitant neural activation in regions associated with cognitive control, social cognition, and reward processing.
Methods:
Data are drawn from the first wave of a longitudinal study of 185 adolescents (Mage = 11.8 years, Range = 9-15 years, 47.8% Female) designed to assess the association between daily family assistance and giving towards family using behavioral and neural data. Participants completed a fMRI decision-making task in which they had the opportunity to give money to caregivers, friends, and strangers. Participants also completed daily diary checklists for 7 days, reporting whether they provided family assistance (i.e., cooking, cleaning, running errands, taking care of siblings) and the amount of time they spent doing so. We used a linear mixed effects model to assess whether giving behavior (denoted by percentage of accepted costly giving trials) varied according to average daily family assistance acts by target (caregiver, friend, stranger). Targets were defined as the within-subject effect and costly giving behavior as the between-subject effect. We then employed bivariate associations between ROIs implicated in cognitive control (dlPFC, vlPFC), social cognition (TPJ), and reward processing (VS, VTA), and average daily family assistance acts.
Results:
Results from the linear mixed effects model are presented in Table 1. We found that adolescents who engage in more family assistance acts each day were less likely to give to strangers (b = -0.02, p < .0.04), showing a preference for family and friends (see Figure 1). Further, daily family assistance was unassociated with activation in selected ROIs associated with cognitive control, social cognition, and reward processing.
Conclusions:
We found that daily family assistance acts in adolescence was linked with less giving behavior towards strangers and a greater preference for giving to family and friends, suggesting that this may reflect an in-group bias associated with less prosocial behavior towards unknown others. Although the bivariate associations between the ROI mean activation levels and daily family assistance acts do not reveal significant associations, this suggests the links between daily family assistance and giving towards others may be more complex during adolescence. These results highlight the importance of considering a more nuanced understanding (e.g., functional connectivity between ROIs) of the association between daily family assistance and neural processing while giving to others.
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Social Interaction
Social Neuroscience Other 1
Lifespan Development:
Early life, Adolescence, Aging
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
Activation (eg. BOLD task-fMRI) 2
Keywords:
Development
FUNCTIONAL MRI
Other - Decision-Making
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
Provide references using author date format
Karan, M. (2022). Giving to others and neural processing during adolescence. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 56, 101128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101128
Telzer, E. H. (2010). Gaining while giving: An fMRI study of the rewards of family assistance among White and Latino youth. Social Neuroscience, 5(5–6), 508–518. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470911003687913
van de Groep, S. (2022). Growing in generosity? The effects of giving magnitude, target, and audience on the neural signature of giving in adolescence. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 54, 101084. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101084