Abstract
Cooperation is an integral part of human social life and we often build teams to achieve certain goals. However, very little is currently understood about emotions with regard to cooperation. Here, we investigated the impact of social context (playing alone versus playing on a team) on emotions while winning or losing a game. We hypothesized that activity in the reward network is modulated by the social context and that personality characteristics might impact team play. We conducted an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment that involved a simple game of dice. In the team condition, the participant played with a partner against another two-person team. In the single-player condition, the participant played alone against another player. Our results revealed that reward processing in the right amygdala was modulated by the social context. The main effect of outcome (gains versus losses) was associated with increased responses in the reward network. We also found that differences in the reward-related neural response due to social context were associated with specific personality traits. When playing on a team, increased activity in the amygdala during winning was a unique function of openness, while decreased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum during losing was associated with extraversion and conscientiousness, respectively. In conclusion, we provide evidence that working on a team influences the affective value of a negative outcome by attenuating the negative response associated with it in the amygdala. Our results also show that brain reward responses in a social context are affected by personality traits related to teamwork.
Highlights
Cooperation is an integral part of human social life
Repeated measures ANOVA [2 x 2 x 2] of the results of the implicit measure revealed no significant main effect of experiment functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) Results A repeated-measures ANOVA [2 x 2] revealed an interaction effect (F(1,27) = 2.24, p = 0.01) and a main effect of outcome (F(1,27) = 17.56, p,0.001) indicating enhanced activity in response to gains compared to losses in the right amygdala (Figure 4), but no main effect of setting (F(1,27) = 3.43, p = 0.07)
Our results suggest that receiving a negative outcome together with a teammate elicits a smaller decrease in blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in the right amygdala than when receiving it alone
Summary
Cooperation is an integral part of human social life. Humans cooperate in many ways and settings and to degrees that are unequalled among animals. A large body of research in cognitive neuroscience has investigated the neural underpinnings of social decision making through economic games [8,9] that focus on cooperative mechanisms (e.g., [10]). We still know very little, about the relationship of emotions with cooperation and how cooperation affects emotional experiences. We still know very little about the neural systems underlying cooperation and teamwork. The aim of the present study was to investigate how reward processing is modulated by cooperative behavior in terms of teamwork, how sharing gains and losses in a team context modulates affective responses and how certain personality characteristics and brain responses in reward-sensitive regions relate to each other in regard to cooperative behavior
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