Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2024-04-23
Abstract： Prosocial behavior is suggested to be a central feature of human life and there is an ongoing debate regarding whether individuals have, therefore, developed a general intuitive tendency to act prosocially or not. Although previous studies have found various indicators of intuitive prosociality from different perspectives, evidence on the potential causal relationship between processing mods and prosocial behavior is mixed. The social heuristics hypothesis (SHH), as a theoretical framework to address this conflicting issue, suggests that associations between processing mode and prosocial behavior are complex and multifaceted, influenced by individual variability and the contexts in which it occurs. A previous study has revealed that intuitive prosocial behavior is more likely to emerge in a perceived emergency that require immediate response. We expected that processing mode (intuition vs. deliberation) will impact people’s decision-making in different helping situations.
The study focused on charitable giving. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we examined the neural mechanisms underlying the effects of processing mode and emergency on helping behaviors. We explored whether a neural signature that rapidly encodes the motivational salience of an event, the P3, can be regulated by processing mode × situation interaction or not. Participants were required to allocate varying amounts of money between themselves and charities they initially labelled as emergency or non-emergency situation that promoted intuitive or deliberative decision making. Each participant received 70 CNY. An instruction on the screen explained that the task required participants to “Accept” or “Reject” donation offers affecting their 70 CNY. To manipulate processing mode, each participant completed fast donation sessions where they were instructed to make decisions as fast as possible, and slow donation sessions where they were instructed to stop and reflect for at least 5 seconds before deciding. EEG signals were recorded during decision making.
The behavioral results indicated that both average contributions and average acceptance rates were affected by emergency, with emergency events eliciting more helping behavior compared to non-emergency events. Moreover, participants considered the offer costliness when making decisions. In emergency situations, participants were more likely to accept high-cost offers than in the non-emergency situations. The ERP components analysis revealed that: a) In the early stages, intuitive processing induced a more negative anterior N1 (AN1) compared to deliberative processing; b) Deliberative processing was associated with a more positive P2 compared to intuitive processing; c) In non-emergency situations, deliberative processing induced a more positive P3 compared to intuitive processing, whereas no significant differences were observed between processing mode in emergency situations.
These results suggest that prosocial behavior is affected by both the emergency of event and the costliness of the offer. As costs increase, individuals are more inclined to help in emergency situations than in non-emergency situations. Furthermore, processing mode affects individual’s early attention and the evaluation of stimuli. Stimuli in intuition condition can capture more early attention, while stimuli in deliberation condition receive more thorough processing. Notably, deliberative processing of non-emergency events involves greater decision-making conflicts and consumes more psychological resources. Overall, these findings shed light on the connection between processing mode and human prosociality, and extend our understanding of the social heuristics hypothesis.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： The role of cognitive control in divergent thinking is one of the concerns in the field of creativity research. Many scholars consider that core cognitive control involves working memory, cognitive inhibition, and cognitive flexibility. Working memory plays an important role in task goal maintenance and the retrieval and manipulation of the task-related information during divergent thinking. Different types of cognitive inhibition may affect divergent thinking in diverse ways. For example, proponent response inhibition can be used for suppressing retrieval of common ideas; resistance to task-unrelated interference can be used for maintaining proper internally-directed attention, and low resistance to potentially irrelevant stimulus can be adopted for providing all possible combinations of concepts. In addition, as a high-order cognitive control, fluid intelligence can contribute to divergent thinking through enhancing the flexibility of strategies uses. In recent years, extensive neuroscience studies have demonstrated the involvement of cooperation between default mode network and executive control network in different stages of creative cognition. Based on present findings, future research should aim to: (1) distinguish conceptual relationships among subcomponents of cognitive control; (2) explore whether the effect of cognitive control on divergent thinking could be modulated by other potential factors, such as motivation or emotion; (3) investigate whether individual differences or task demand influence the dynamic interplay between cognitive control network and default mode network.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： It is known that as a training tool, ZEN has an extensive influence on human’s mental processes. In terms of divergent thinking and convergent thinking, the two important, similar but different ways of ZEN show significant differences. Meditation improves divergent thinking mainly based on cognitive flexibility and other factors such as attention strategies, the unconscious activation, the problem-solving motivation and emotion regulation; in terms of convergent thinking, by means of regulating executive function and possible cognitive restructuring, mindfulness can promote the transformation of set or functional fixedness. In terms of the mechanism, enhancing effect of ZEN on creative thinking not only benefits from the unconscious associative processing when the mind wanders, but also is adjusted by emotion effect induced by ZEN. This article sorts out the above-mentioned questions systematically, then points out the deficiencies of previous studies and prospects several future research directions.
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