Abstract
“Wanting”, a component of reward processing, is a motivational property that guides decision making in goal-oriented behavior. This includes behavior aiming at supporting relational bonds, even at the group level. Accordingly, group belongingness works as this motivational property, which is fundamentally different from romantic or maternal love. While primary rewards (or learned associations, such as money) have been largely used to study the conceptual framework associated with “wanting,” other cues triggering behavior, such as passionate motives, are less well-studied. We investigated the neural correlates of value estimation of a passion-driven incentive in neuropsychologically defined football fans. We asked the participants (n = 57) to compute the value of football tickets (the cues that trigger passionate behavior in this “tribal love” context). The trials were all different, comprising tickets for different matches. The participants had no restrictions on the amount to be introduced. This enabled a parametric functional magnetic resonance imaging design based on the explicit estimated value given by the participants in a trial-by-trial approach. Using a whole-brain approach (to prevent biased focus on value-related regions), only the activity in the ventral caudate and left anterior insula showed a critical relationship with the reported value. Higher normalized values led to more activity in the striatum and left insula. The parametric map shows that these regions encode the magnitude of incentive by indexing self-relevant value. Other regions were involved in value computation, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, but did not exhibit parametric patterns. The involvement of the nucleus accumbens in value estimation was only found in region of interest -based analysis, which emphasizes the role of the ventral caudate for the presently studied social “reinforcer” cue.
Highlights
Group belongingness supports relational bonds and represents a human need (Baumeister and Leary, 1995)
Using a whole-brain GLM approach, we found a critical role for the ventral caudate in the computation of such magnitude properties: the higher the activity in ventral caudate, the higher the estimated value
Our work provides evidence for a unique role of the ventral caudate and its association with the left anterior insula in this uniquely human form of goal-oriented decision making involving estimation of value
Summary
Group belongingness supports relational bonds and represents a human need (Baumeister and Leary, 1995). Humans need to be connected to peers, nurturing ingroup relations. Self-preservation and safety motives may underlie this phenomenon (Brewer, 2007) such that belongingness feelings create a strong motivation to nurture social relationships (Baumeister and Leary, 1995). One piece of evidence for this is the well-known feature of human behavior: ingroup bias. The feeling of group belongingness is known to bias empathy and helping attitudes among diverse social groups (Molenberghs, 2013; Cikara and Van Bavel, 2014; Hackel et al, 2017; Molenberghs and Louis, 2018)
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