## KNOWING THE SELF: INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON SELF RELATED PROCESSING

EDITED BY : Wei Fan, Jiajin Yuan, Chao Liu, Yanhong Wu, Zhao Xin and Yiping Zhong PUBLISHED IN : Frontiers in Psychology

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ISSN 1664-8714 ISBN 978-2-88963-956-4 DOI 10.3389/978-2-88963-956-4

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## KNOWING THE SELF: INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON SELF RELATED PROCESSING

Topic Editors:

Wei Fan, Hunan Normal University, China Jiajin Yuan, Southwest University, China Chao Liu, Beijing Normal University, China Yanhong Wu, Peking University, China Zhao Xin, Northwest Normal University, China Yiping Zhong, Hunan Normal University, China

Citation: Fan, W., Yuan, J., Liu, C., Wu, Y., Xin, Z., Zhong, Y., eds. (2020). Knowing the Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Self Related Processing. Lausanne: Frontiers Media SA. doi: 10.3389/978-2-88963-956-4

# Table of Contents

	- Jia Zhu and Youlong Zhan

Lei Liu, Wenjie Li, Jin Li, Lingna Lou and Jie Chen

*58 Effect of Probability Information on Bayesian Reasoning: A Study of Event-Related Potentials*

Zifu Shi, Lin Yin, Jian Dong, Xiang Ma and Bo Li

*66 Corrigendum: Effect of Probability Information on Bayesian Reasoning: A Study of Event-Related Potentials*

Zifu Shi, Lin Yin, Jian Dong, Xiang Ma and Bo Li

Ruixue Xia, Wanru Su, Fangping Wang, Shifeng Li, Aibao Zhou and Dong Lyu

*104 Self-Deception Reduces Cognitive Load: The Role of Involuntary Conscious Memory Impairment*

Zengdan Jian, Wenjie Zhang, Ling Tian, Wei Fan and Yiping Zhong

*115 The Effects of Working Memory and Probability Format on Bayesian Reasoning*

Lin Yin, Zifu Shi, Zixiang Liao, Ting Tang, Yuntian Xie and Shun Peng

# The Experience of Beauty of Chinese Poetry and Its Neural Substrates

Chunhai Gao1,2 and Cheng Guo1,2 \*

1 Laboratory of Personality Development and Social Adaptation, Department of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China, 2 Research Center of Mental Health Education, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

Chinese poetry has a long history and high esthetic value. People who engage esthetically with Chinese poetry would feel the sense of beauty naturally. However, there is little information regarding what happens in the brain when an individual appreciates Chinese poetry, and how the brain processes the subject's appreciation of beauty. Herein, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates of experiencing beauty by appreciating Chinese poetry. The participants in our study were 28 college students and the stimuli consisted of 25 Chinese poetry and 25 prose selections. Based on an event-related paradigm, the findings of this study suggested that different areas scattered in both the left and right cerebral hemispheres are activated when an individual appreciates Chinese poetry. Compared to reading prose, appreciating Chinese poetry heightens the activation of the left inferior orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the bilateral insula, the left fusiform, the left supplementary motor area (SMA), and the left precentral gyrus. In these areas, the left inferior OFC and the bilateral insula are considered closely related to experiencing beauty of Chinese poetry, which have been demonstrated that it is an important neural basis of esthetic beauty when using other types of materials. The findings of this study shed new light on the complex but ordinary processes of experiencing beauty when appreciating Chinese poetry and show that some key processes underlying the feeling of esthetic beauty are shared across different esthetic domains.

#### Edited by:

Chao Liu, Beijing Normal University, China

#### Reviewed by:

Dandan Zhang, Shenzhen University, China Wenbo Luo, Liaoning Normal University, China

#### \*Correspondence:

Cheng Guo<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 15 June 2018 Accepted: 02 August 2018 Published: 21 August 2018

#### Citation:

Gao C and Guo C (2018) The Experience of Beauty of Chinese Poetry and Its Neural Substrates. Front. Psychol. 9:1540. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01540 Keywords: Chinese poetry, reading, appreciation, beauty, OFC, insula, neuroesthetics, fMRI

## INTRODUCTION

Individuals who appreciate poems can feel a sense of beauty while doing so. In fact, this is one reason that they read poems. This has already been established in studies carried out at different times and in different cultures, as well as in individuals of all ages. Chinese poetry, which have high esthetic value, comprise an important form of poetry. Written forms of Chinese poetry have been found to exist as early as the first millennium BC. These poems were written based on the daily working lives of individuals, especially those involved in singing and dancing. Chinese poetry are representative of Chinese culture, and are concentrated expressions of Chinese art. Large numbers of Chinese individuals enjoy reading Chinese poems. In addition, these poems are popular among individuals who like poetry and have interest in Chinese culture. In general, like other forms of poetry, Chinese poetry is naturally associated with the expression and inspiration of affective and impressive meanings and emotions (Ludtke et al., 2014). The terms and speech used in Chinese poetry are esthetically and perceptually appreciated (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011). However, the

**4**

manner in which the brain processes Chinese poetry is unclear. In addition, the specific neural substrates for the feeling of beauty stimulated by these brain activities are still unknown. We investigated the neural substrates of the feelings induced by appreciating Chinese poetry and determined the regions whose activities are correlated with feelings of beauty. Investigating the activation of brains stimulated by the esthetic appreciation of Chinese poetry is of great value. First, it is important for the humanities to understand the problem of esthetic appreciation of poems at a basic level. Second, our investigation provides evidence for the cross-cultural consistency of the esthetic appreciation of poems. Third, our investigation is helpful in understanding human esthetics, and especially the neural basis of esthetics. Our research findings also provide empirical evidence that may be used to study the neural mechanisms of poetic esthetics.

Advances in non-invasive neuroimaging techniques have allowed us to research healthy participants under controlled situations, and to associate the appreciation of the beauty of poetry with the activities of several brain structures. We can also use neuroimaging to study the processes of underlying the appreciation of beauty in art forms other than poetry. The field of neuroesthetics has thus been developed to answer questions regarding the neural underpinnings of esthetics (Pearce et al., 2016). New theoretical work and experimental studies have led to remarkable progress in neuroesthetics.

Neuroimaging studies have been used to investigate the neurocognitive underpinnings of the esthetic appreciation of different art forms, such as paintings (Vartanian and Goel, 2004; Cupchik et al., 2009; Kirk et al., 2009b), sculptures (Di Dio et al., 2007), architecture (Kirk et al., 2009a), everyday designed products (Yeh et al., 2015), human faces (Aharon et al., 2001; Ishai et al., 2007; Winston et al., 2007), abstract geometrical patterns (Jacobsen et al., 2006), mathematics (Zeki et al., 2014), music (Blood and Zatorre, 2001; Koelsch, 2010; Ishizu and Zeki, 2011; Brattico and Pearce, 2013; Zatorre and Salimpoor, 2013; Koelsch and Skouras, 2014), dance (Calvo-Merino et al., 2005, 2008; Cross and Ticini, 2012), and literature (Bohrn et al., 2013). Research in the different esthetic domains listed above has thus far been unbalanced. The majority of empirical studies have been carried out to investigate visual and auditory domains, while research in other fields, such as literature appreciation, is less common.

Although relevant empirical studies are relatively few, some representative research has been reported. Zeman et al. (2013) studied brain activation by poetry and prose. O'Sullivan et al. (2015) studied the neural basis of literary consciousness. Bohrn et al. (2013) performed pioneering research in this field when they attempted to determine whether reading is accompanied by an implicit esthetic evaluation. In the experiments described in the above report, the participants were requested to read a number of proverbs without explicitly evaluating them. The authors found that large parts of the left frontal lobe, left medial temporal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus, bilateral occipital lobes, and bilateral precentral gyri were activated during the reading activities. They also identified correlations between specific brain regions and feelings of beauty. These regions were the right caudate nucleus, the anterior cingulate, and the cerebellum. On the basis of empirical research results, Jacobs (2015) proposed a model called the neurocognitive poetics model (NCPM) to elucidate the mechanisms of poetry reception using a neural perspective. The NCPM postulates that different features of poetry texts can activate different neural networks and cognitive-affection processes.

Stimuli other than appreciating literature have also been found to have neural correlates of the feeling of beauty. Kawabata and Zeki (2004) found that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is differentially engaged during the viewing of beautiful paintings. Previous research using other stimuli in the visual esthetic domain (Kirk, 2008; Kirk et al., 2009a,b; Lacey et al., 2011; Ishizu and Zeki, 2013; Flexas et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2016) and the music esthetic domain (Ishizu and Zeki, 2011) has led to similar conclusions. The insula is another key brain region involved in feelings of beauty. This reflects the "viscerality" of esthetic perception (Cupchik et al., 2009; Brown et al., 2011; Flexas et al., 2014). Jacobs et al. (2012) found that the frontomedial cortex and the amygdala appear to be selectively sensitive to beauty during beauty judgments. In addition, the lingual gyrus has been shown to be activated in some studies of beauty (Kawabata and Zeki, 2004; Vartanian and Goel, 2004; Mizokami et al., 2014; Vartanian and Skov, 2014). There are no consistent conclusions regarding the brain regions that are important for the feeling of beauty thus far.

In sum, the main purpose of our experiment was to investigate the neural substrates of the experience of beauty induced by appreciating Chinese poetry. Changes in regional cerebral blood flow can be measured during the appreciation of Chinese poetry to test our hypothesis. Our study was based on the following hypotheses:

#### H1. The basis of the esthetic appreciation of Chinese poetry is similar to that of German proverbs and English poems.

Brain activity during the appreciation of literature has been investigated using other types of literary material, such as German proverbs (Bohrn et al., 2013) and English poems (Zeman et al., 2013; O'Sullivan et al., 2015). However, the brain activity induced by the appreciation of Chinese poetry is still unknown. We expect that there is some consistency in the neural basis of the effects of appreciating literature in any type or form.

H2. Comparison of brain activity patterns observed during the appreciation of Chinese poetry to those observed during the reading of prose will reveal significant activation patterns in specific brain regions (e.g., OFC and insula) that are related to the appreciation of beauty. This is in accordance with previous research on the appreciation of beauty in the visual and auditory arts.

Previous studies on the esthetic appreciation of visual and auditory arts have shown that the feeling of beauty may recruit cortical systems such as the OFC (e.g., Kawabata and Zeki, 2004; Kirk, 2008; Kirk et al., 2009a,b; Lacey et al., 2011; Ishizu and Zeki, 2013; Flexas et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2016) and insula (e.g., Cupchik et al., 2009; Brown et al., 2011; Flexas et al., 2014). Therefore, we hypothesize that comparing brain activity patterns observed during the appreciating Chinese poetry to

those observed during the reading of prose can reveal significant activation in brain regions related to the appreciation of beauty induced by other art forms, especially in the OFC and the insula. Differences in brain activation induced by the reading of poetry vs. prose have previously been studies (Zeman et al., 2013; O'Sullivan et al., 2015). However, there are no consistent conclusions regarding this issue. Our study should validate the results obtained by other researchers and identify brain regions associated with the esthetic of poetry. The neural correlates of the appreciation of beauty induced by Chinese poetry should recruit the cortical system in a similar manner to those of the much better investigated esthetic appreciation of other art forms.

## MATERIALS AND METHODS

#### Participants

Twenty-eight right-handed participants (mean age: 19 years; range: 18–21 year; 14 women and 14 men) who were healthy and had normal vision or corrected-to-normal vision participated in this study. The participants were good at reading1 . Bad readers (e.g., those with dyslexia) were excluded. None of the participants had received special poetry education and all were naive to the hypothesis of this experiment. All participants voluntarily agreed to participate in this study and signed a written informed consent prior to their inclusion in the study. The study was supported and sponsored by the Human Ethics Committee of the Southwest University for the Brain Mapping Research. The participants received financial rewards at the end of the study.

## Stimuli

Two types of stimuli were used: poetry and prose. Each group of stimuli comprised 25 items (samples of the materials are shown in **Figure 1**). The stimuli shown to the participants were identical. All of the selected poems were popular Qi Yan Jue Ju (Qijue in short; i.e., seven-character quatrain), which is a type of famous Chinese poetry. In order to better study and research the neural substrates of esthetic beauty induced by appreciating Chinese poetry, high-quality poems were chosen first. Highquality Chinese poetry has the following features:

1Our research focuses on the appreciation of Chinese poetry while reading silently by oneself. Reading aloud or being read to by others is not considered here.

There are many different types of high-quality Chinese poetry. In this study, we chose QiJue as our experimental stimuli for three reasons. First, Qijue has high artistic value, which individuals appreciate. Second, Qijue has a very formal style. Qijue has strict requirements for sentence number in each poem and for character number in each sentence. There are generally four sentences in each poem and seven characters in each sentence. Third, QiJue is marked by strict tonal patterns and rhyme schemes constituting a well-structured prosodic hierarchy (Li and Yang, 2010). Because of this feature, we were able to ensure that all poems had the same number of words, sentence length, tonal patterns, rhythm, and rhyme. The poems used in the experiment were chosen from Chinese Literature Education and were equally familiar to all participants. The prose selections, which served as the control condition stimuli, lacked poetry characteristics and stylistic features, but had valid literal interpretations. The topics of the carefully chosen prose selections were familiar to the participants (simple statements regarding world-knowledge). Lexical parameters, such as the number of words and sentence length, were matched across the prose selections and were identical to those of the poems. The font type, font color, font size, and line spacing were consistent in all of the texts.

#### Procedure

The trials were presented using an event-related design while the participants were in the scanner. The Chinese poetry and the prose selections were randomly sorted and appeared in succession. In order to directly compare our results to those of researchers who have explored brain activity correlated with beauty, using other types of stimuli (Vartanian and Goel, 2004; Jacobsen et al., 2006; Winston et al., 2007; Kirk et al., 2009b), we decided to adopt experimental procedures similar to those used in the above studies. While we based our procedures on the above research, we made some improvements to the procedures in our study. Chinese poetry and prose were read during the scan. Similar functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research regarding the appreciation of Chinese poetry has not been conducted before. Therefore, a behavioral preexperiment was designed to test the durations of the stimuli. We found that the average time required for the participants to appreciate a poem sufficiently was 11.33 s. We therefore used 12 s as the reading time in the fMRI experiment. After reading and appreciating the stimuli, the participants were required to provide an explicit esthetic judgment. Our experiment was thus different from a previous study that used an implicit esthetic judgment (Bohrn et al., 2013). We chose to include an explicit esthetic judgment task during the fMRI because it was likely to enhance the effects of the stimuli by requiring the participants

to pay attention to the esthetic qualities of the stimuli. This task also increased the possibility that the participants would engage in the more advanced cognitive stages of the interpretation and evaluation of art-specific attributes despite the wide range of other processes that may subconsciously impact the esthetic experience (Leder et al., 2004). Furthermore, the time required to appreciate Chinese poetry was obviously longer than that required to read a proverb. This also contributed to our decision to choose an explicit esthetic judgment task.

Before entering the scanner, the participants received complete instructions regarding the research, a consent form, and a personal information form. A brief practice session was also carried out. Once inside the scanner, the participant's head was fixed using foam pads, which minimized the motions of the participant's head. The stimuli were displayed on a backprojection screen positioned at the bottom of the scanner. The stimuli were viewed via a mirror placed on top of the head coil. The responses of the participants were recorded using two fiber-optic button boxes tied to the participant's right and left hands. E-Prime (Psychological Software Tools, Inc., Sharpsburg, PA, United States) was used to present and time the stimuli, and to collect data.

Our experiment consisted of two runs, each of which consisted of 25 trials. Each run started with a display of the word "ready" on the screen, which was followed a dummy scan for 16 s. The 25 trials were then presented consecutively. Each trial was initiated by a 2-s display of a fixation cross at the center of the viewing screen and was followed by a stimulus. The stimulus was presented for 12 s. During the presentation of the stimulus, the participants were asked to focus on appreciating the stimulus in silence. After appreciating the stimulus, the participants were requested to complete an esthetic judgment task, which consisted of rating the beauty of the stimulus on a scale ranging from 1 (no sense of beauty) to 4 (great sense of beauty). The participants were asked to provide their ratings within 2 s. Two fiber-optic button boxes were held in the participants' right and left hands. Each button box had two buttons. The buttons represented 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Half of the participants used their right hands to press 1 and 2, and the other half used their left hands to press 1 and 2 when entering their answers. A blank screen was displayed after the rating task. The inter-trial intervals were randomly chosen to last 6, 8, or 10 s. Each run lasted for approximately 616 s. Every subject took part in both runs. There was a 3-min break between the two runs. **Figure 2** illustrates the task and the procedures.

#### fMRI Acquisition

Whole-brain functional data were acquired using a 3T Siemens scanner (Siemens Magnetom Trio TIM, Erlangen, Germany). During the visual presentations, blood oxygen

level-dependent imaging was performed using a single-shot echo-planar imaging sequence with the following parameters: interslice skip = 0.99 mm; number of slices = 32; repetition time = 2,000 ms; echo time = 30 ms; flip angle = 90◦ ; field of view = 220 mm × 220 mm; matrix size = 64 × 64; voxel size = 3.4 mm × 3.4 mm × 3 mm. Structural data were acquired using T1-weighted images recorded from 176 1-mm-thick slices with an in-plane resolution of 1 × 1 mm (repetition time = 1,900 ms; echo time = 2.52 ms; flip angle = 9◦ ; field of view = 250 mm × 250 mm).

#### Data Analysis

Functional images were preprocessed using SPM82 , which was implemented in MATLAB 2014 (Mathworks Inc., Sherborn, MA, United States). The first five images were discarded to achieve steady magnet states. For T2∗ -weighted images, the slice order was corrected through slice timing, and head movements > 2 mm or 2◦ were removed. The T1-weighted images were co-registered to the mean echo-planar images and segmented into white matter, gray matter, and cerebrospinal fluid. The echo-planar images were then normalized to the Montreal Neurological Institute space using structural information obtained during the co-registration and segmentation. The voxel size was 3 mm× 3mm × 3 mm. Spatial smoothing was performed using a Gaussian kernel of 8 mm × 8 mm × 8 mm at full width at half maximum.

As the first-level analysis, a general linear model was applied to the fMRI time-series wherein stimulus onset was modeled as a single impulse response function. The data were then convolved with the canonical hemodynamic response function. We modeled two conditions of interest: poetry and prose. Head movement parameters were calculated based on the realignment procedure, and were included in the model as covariates of no interest. A high-pass filter with a cutoff of 128 s was used to remove low-frequency signal drifts. As the second-level analysis, activation patterns induced by appreciating Chinese poetry were obtained using a one-sample t-test. We used the contrast between appreciating poetry and reading prose to identify brain regions related to feelings of beauty induced by the appreciation of Chinese poetry (poetry > prose). False discovery rate-corrected p values < 0.05 were considered significant. A cluster size threshold of 40 was used.

## RESULTS

#### Behavioral Results

The mean esthetic judgment rating scores for the Chinese poetry and the prose selections were 3.58 ± 0.64 and 1.33 ± 0.70, respectively. The frequencies of the beauty ratings of the poetry and the prose selections by the participants are shown in **Figure 3**. The Chinese poetry had high beauty ratings, while the prose selections had low beauty ratings. Comparisons between the ratings of the Chinese poetry and those of the prose selections indicate that participants reading Chinese poetry provided

2www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm

FIGURE 3 | Frequencies of beauty scores. The participants were requested to rate the stimuli on a beauty scale after reading the Chinese poetry or prose selections. The scale ranged from 1 to 4. A score of 1 indicated no sense of beauty, 2 indicated a weak sense of beauty, 3 indicated a fair sense of beauty, and 4 indicated a great sense of beauty.

FIGURE 4 | Areas of brain activation during the appreciation of Chinese poetry (p < 0.001, FDR corrected).

significantly higher ratings than those reading prose (t = 61.49, p < 0.0001, Cohen's d = 3.35). Participants who read Chinese poetry felt more beauty than those reading prose.

#### fMRI Results

#### Areas of Brain Activation During the Appreciation of Chinese Poetry

The areas of brain activation during the appreciation of Chinese poetry are depicted in **Figure 4**. Significant activation was found in the bilateral inferior frontal gyri, bilateral inferior temporal gyri, left inferior parietal gyrus, left parahippocampal gyrus, left lingual gyrus, bilateral occipital lobes, left fusiform, bilateral insula, left supplementary motor area (SMA), and left precentral gyrus. Appreciating Chinese poetry induced massive activation of bilateral parts of the cerebral hemispheres.

FIGURE 5 | Brain activation during the appreciation of Chinese poetry vs. that of prose (p < 0.001, FDR corrected). OFC, orbitofrontal cortex; INS, insula; FFG, fusiform gyrus; SMA, supplementary motor area; PreCG, precentral gyrus.

TABLE 1 | Areas of brain activation during the appreciation of Chinese poetry vs. that of prose (p < 0.001, FDR corrected).

FDR, false discovery rate; MNI, Montreal Neurological Institute; OFC, orbitofrontal cortex; SMA, supplementary motor area.

#### Differences Between the Appreciation of Chinese Poetry and That of Prose

To investigate the neural substrates of the feeling of beauty induced by appreciating Chinese poetry, a subtraction analysis comparing the appreciation of Chinese poetry to that of prose was conducted to determine potential differences in blood oxygenation level dependent signal levels during the reading. There were significantly higher activation levels in the left inferior OFC, left fusiform, bilateral insula, left SMA, and left precentral gyrus (**Figure 5** and **Table 1**).

## DISCUSSION

Chinese poetry is a special form of poetry and is deeply loved by readers worldwide. Individuals appreciate Chinese poetry in a subjective and engaged manner while experiencing the mood of the work, the feelings it evokes, and the poetic imagery it implies. Poetry, as the interlude of language and music, has phonological features such as those found in music. These phonological features can influence the appreciation of poetry (Lerdahl, 2001; Li and Yang, 2010). The meter and rhyme of poetry also have an impact on esthetic appreciation (Obermeier et al., 2013). Individuals are able to feel beauty during the appreciation of poetry. This has been demonstrated by our behavioral results. Participants were requested to rate the beauty induced by appreciating Chinese poetry and that induced by prose on a scale ranging from 1 (no sense of beauty) to 4 (great sense of beauty). When reading Chinese poetry, the participants felt high levels of beauty (M = 3.58, standard deviation = 0.64) and assigned a rating 4 to 65.43% of the stimuli and a rating of 1 to only 0.43% of the stimuli. In contrast, the participants reading prose felt low levels of beauty (M = 1.33, standard deviation = 0.70) and assigned a rating of 1 to 78.43% of the stimuli, and a rating of 4 to only 2% of stimuli (**Figure 3**). The behavioral results thus indicate that the participants felt beauty when reading Chinese poetry and that the beauty felt was significantly higher than that felt during the reading of prose. The feeling of beauty is one of the reasons that we enjoy reading Chinese poetry, although the processes that occur in our brains during the appreciation of Chinese poetry and why we feel beauty while appreciating Chinese poetry are still unknown.

Previous researchers have explored the secrets of poetry at a neural level, e.g., Al'tman la (1995). However, earlier studies were devoted to analysis of the mental state under poetic inspiration and produced no consistent conclusions regarding the neural mechanisms underlying the appreciation of poetry. Here we were interested in brain activation related to the appreciation of Chinese poetry. Our analysis of the blood oxygenation leveldependent signals during the appreciation of Chinese poetry revealed significant activation in large parts of the brain (see **Figure 4**). Scattered regions in both cerebral hemispheres were activated. Some of the activated regions were related to visual stimulus perception, sentence reading, and semantic processing. This finding is partly in accordance with previous research on the esthetic appreciation of other forms of literature. Bohrn et al. (2013) have reported that large parts of the left frontal lobe, bilateral middle temporal gyri, bilateral superior temporal gyri, bilateral occipital lobes, and bilateral precentral gyri were activated during the reading of proverbs. The left inferior frontal gyrus, the bilateral occipital lobes, and the left precentral gyrus are areas that were activated in both studies. Zeman et al. (2013) showed that the reading of both poetry and prose can lead to activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus, left precentral gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, bilateral middle occipital gyri, and left mid-fusiform cortex. The same regions were also activated in our study. Specifically, we observed activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus, left precentral gyrus, bilateral occipital gyri, and left fusiform. These findings suggest that reading literature or poetry of any kind leads to the activation of similar neural substrates. This supports our hypothesis H1. Among these related regions, the bilateral occipital lobes were strongly activated when reading Chinese poetry. This indicates that the brain can receive visual stimulation from the poetry and induce intense visual attention to beautiful visual objects (Cela-Conde et al., 2004). The activations of the bilateral inferior frontal gyri, bilateral inferior temporal

gyri, left inferior parietal gyrus, left parahippocampal gyrus, and left lingual gyrus have been reported during sentence reading and semantic processing (Mechelli et al., 2000; Keller et al., 2001; Binder et al., 2009). Activation of the bilateral middle frontal gyri is related to rhymes and tones in the reading of Chinese text (Gandour et al., 2003). These findings indicate that the process of appreciating Chinese poetry involves at a minimum the perception of the visual words, sentence reading, and the semantic interpretation of the poetry.

Appreciating Chinese poetry led to the activation of other parts of the brain in addition to those described above. These regions were differentially activated during the appreciation of Chinese poetry vs. the prose selections. The contrast between the appreciation of poetry and that of prose was reflected in the activation of a distributed network including the left inferior OFC, bilateral insula, left fusiform, left SMA, and left precentral gyrus (**Figure 5** and **Table 1**). Among these regions, the OFC and the insula are key substrates of the feeling of beauty. These two regions have been identified as important "esthetic centers" in the human brain (Brown et al., 2011). Brown et al. (2011) carried out the most comprehensive analysis of neuroesthetic processing by carrying out voxel-based meta-analyses of 93 neuroimaging studies of positive-valence esthetic appraisal across four sensory modalities. The results of the above investigation indicate that the most concordant area of activation across all four modalities is the right anterior insula. The authors of the above study the co-activation of the sensory-specific regions of the OFC and a supermodel area located in the anterior insula are involved in the overall process of esthetic appreciation. Furthermore, Blood and Zatorre (2001) found that the OFC and the insula took part in the appreciation of music and were related to musical "chills," which is a phenomenon that occurs during esthetic appreciation. In addition, Zeman et al. (2013) reported similar results using the experimental poetic material.

We observed differences in the activation of the left inferior OFC while the participants appreciate Chinese poetry vs. prose. The OFC, and especially the medial OFC, has been shown to be important for the feeling of beauty by previous studies on different art forms (Blood and Zatorre, 2001; Kawabata and Zeki, 2004; Jacobsen et al., 2006; Di Dio et al., 2007; Kirk et al., 2009b; Zhang et al., 2016). Kawabata and Zeki (2004) suggested that activation of the OFC correlates with judgments of beauty and ugliness. Kirk et al. (2009a) compared experts and non-experts in their appreciation of architectural stimuli and concluded that the response profile of the medial OFC in both groups had a positive linear correlation with esthetic ratings. The OFC is sensitive to the magnitude of the esthetic value. This is supported by studies of reward processing, which show that the relative reward values of the stimuli are reflected by the amplitudes of neural activity in the OFC (Kringelbach, 2005). The hypothesis of valence processing, which was introduced by Kringelbach (2005), states that the medial OFC is associated with positive valence, while the lateral OFC is involved in negative valence. As mentioned above, the OFC has an important role in the feeling of beauty. We thus assume that it also plays a key role in the feeling of beauty induced by Chinese poetry.

Activation of the bilateral insula in our study indicates that it may be involved in the generation of esthetic emotions when the participant is appreciating the beauty of Chinese poetry. This result agrees very well with previous studies of esthetics in other domains. Di Dio et al. (2007) have shown that the right anterior insula is activated when participants view objectively beautiful sculptures when compared to sculptures modified to be less proportional. The authors propose that the positive feeling elicited by viewing the canonical sculptures is mediated by a cortical network involving the anterior insula. Cupchik et al. (2009) have reported that esthetic perception activates the bilateral insula. They believe that the bilateral insula play important roles in esthetic emotions. Two other large-scale meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies on esthetic appreciation also concluded that the anterior insula is a key structure in experiencing esthetic emotions. The insula, and especially the anterior insula, is known to play a critical role in emotional processing (Craig, 2010). The left side of the insula is associated with the evaluation of positive emotions, while the right side is associated with the evaluation of negative emotions (Craig, 2005, 2010; Tsukiura and Cabeza, 2011). Leder et al. (2004) have suggested that the insula is involved in "continuous affective evaluation". Compared to prose, Chinese poetry contain more complex and abundant emotions. Therefore, appreciating the beauty of Chinese poetry produces many explicit esthetic emotions, which probably involve the function of the insula. We found significantly higher activation of the bilateral insula in participants appreciating Chinese poetry vs. those reading prose.

In addition to the left inferior OFC and the bilateral insula, the left fusiform, the left precentral gyrus, and the left SMA were significantly more highly activated during the reading of poetry vs. that of prose. Similar results have been reported in previous studies of esthetics using words as stimuli (Bohrn et al., 2013; Zeman et al., 2013; Hsu et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2016). These areas are thus probably related to the process of reading and understanding of words and literature. The left fusiform is associated with reading single words, and is often described as the visual word form area (Jobard et al., 2003). Some researchers also hypothesize that this area is dedicated to determining and understanding word meanings (Devlin et al., 2006). The left precentral gyrus had heightened activation in response to Chinese poetry. This activation may be linked to motor activation via the processes of understanding (Pulvermuller et al., 2005). Activation of these regions is mainly involved in the perception of esthetics.

Based on the discussion above, the fMRI results confirm our hypothesis H2. We compared brain activity patterns during the appreciation of Chinese poetry to those during the reading of prose. We found significant activation in specific brain regions (e.g., OFC and insula) related to the appreciation of beauty. This result is in accordance with those of studies of brain regions related to the feeling of beauty induced by other art forms.

Here, we investigated the neural correlates of feeing beauty induced by the appreciation of Chinese poetry. Appreciation of Chinese poetry is a very complicated and complex process, and involves the perception of words, sentence reading,

comprehension of poetry, and the processing of esthetic emotion. Appreciating Chinese poetry thus requires different brain regions to work together. The bilateral inferior frontal gyri, bilateral inferior temporal gyri, left inferior parietal gyrus, left parahippocampal gyrus, left lingual gyrus, bilateral occipital lobes, left fusiform, bilateral insula, left SMA, and left precentral gyrus were more strongly activated during the appreciation of Chinese poetry. Our behavioral results indicate that reading Chinese poetry leads to much higher feelings of beauty than reading prose. Investigating the differences between the appreciation of Chinese poetry and that of prose can thus help us to better understand the neural substrates of beauty when appreciating Chinese poetry. We found increased activation in the left inferior OFC, left fusiform, bilateral insula, left SMA, and left precentral gyrus during the appreciation of Chinese poetry when compared to the reading of prose. These findings suggest that some of the neural correlates associated with feelings of beauty induced by Chinese poetry are the same as those activated by stimuli from other esthetic domains. While the present research is a tentative exploration, our findings suggest the possibility that the above regions are closely associated with feelings of beauty induced by Chinese poetry. The concrete mechanisms underlying the activation of these regions and their association with feelings of beauty induced by Chinese poetry merits further exploration in future studies.

## REFERENCES

## ETHICS STATEMENT

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Human Ethics Committee of the Southwest University for the Brain Mapping Research with written informed consent from all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the Human Ethics Committee of the Southwest University for the Brain Mapping Research.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

All the authors worked together to design the experiment, prepared materials, conducted the experiment, and finally they analyzed the data and finished this paper. All the authors agreed that the final version of the manuscript is suitable for submission and approved to take responsibilities for every aspect of the whole work.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Hongwen Song, Jingxi Liao, Pan Feng, Shuang Song, and Shunmin Zhang for their valuable support.

perception. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101, 6321–6325. doi: 10.1073/pnas.<PHONE_NUMBER>

meter and rhyme in poetry. Front. psychol. 4:10. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00 010

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2018 Gao and Guo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Distraction Modulates Self-Referential Effects in the Processing of Monetary and Social Rewards

Jia Zhu1,2 \* † and Youlong Zhan3†

1 Department of Psychology, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China, 2 Department of Psychology, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha, China, 3 Department of Psychology, Hunan University of Science and Technology, Xiangtan, China

A reward that is personally relevant tends to induce stronger pursuit motivation than a reward that is linked to other people. However, the role of attention in eliciting this "self-referential reward effect" remains unclear. In our two studies, we evaluated the significance of attention in self-referential reward processing utilizing an ownership paradigm, which required participants to complete a visual search task to win either monetary rewards (in Study 1) or social rewards (in Study 2) for themselves or for an acquaintance. Access to attentional resources was manipulated by sometimes including a distracting stimulus among the presented stimuli. The results of Study 1 revealed that a significant self-referential reward effect emerged under undistracted attentional conditions and was associated with improved task performance when self-owned monetary rewards were available. However, distracted attention impaired this self-referential reward effect. Moreover, distracted attention was also observed in the self-referential social reward processing in Study 2. These results suggested that distracted attention can impair the pursuit advantage for self-relevant rewards; self-referential processing is strongly dependent on attentional resources.

#### Keywords: self-relevance, attention, social reward, monetary reward, ownership

## INTRODUCTION

The influence of the self on attentional processes has been recognized by psychologists. It has been proposed that humans are equipped with a mechanism that enables self-relevant information to be attended to rapidly and reliably (Gray et al., 2004; Sui et al., 2006; Turk et al., 2011a). Numerous studies have reported that when a stimulus is cued as being relevant to one's self, event-related potentials (ERPs) suggest a rapid increase in both visuospatial and executive attention to the stimulus (Herbert et al., 2011; Turk et al., 2011b; Fan et al., 2013; Northoff, 2016; Sui and Gu, 2017). The tendency for self-cues to capture attention is clearly advantageous, as information that is coupled with the self is likely to be of greater personal importance than material linked with other people. Reflecting this potential importance, a reward associated with oneself elicits a robust motivating advantage compared to a reward linked to another person (Krigolson et al., 2013; Sui and Humphreys, 2015; Zhan et al., 2016). Thus, the question of interest in the present study is whether the increased motivation to earn self-relevant rewards depends on the attentional resources devoted to self-cues.

#### Edited by:

Snehlata Jaswal, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, India

#### Reviewed by:

Jiajin Yuan, Southwest University, China Wenhai Zhang, Hengyang Normal University, China

\*Correspondence:

Jia Zhu<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
†These authors have contributed equally to this work

#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 10 August 2018 Accepted: 18 December 2018 Published: 09 January 2019

#### Citation:

Zhu J and Zhan Y (2019) Distraction Modulates Self-Referential Effects in the Processing of Monetary and Social Rewards. Front. Psychol. 9:2723. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02723

A number of studies have reported self-referential effects in reward processing and suggested that self- and reward-related processing either interacted or were independent in various external contexts (Northoff and Hayes, 2011). For instance, compared to other-relevant reward stimuli, self-relevant reward stimuli can be perceived faster during a series of perceptual matching tasks (Sui et al., 2015a,b), result in faster learning of reward rules in a social gambling task (Kwak et al., 2014), elicit larger P2 and P3, which indicate stronger respective attentional salience and motivational importance (Martín et al., 2016; Zhan et al., 2017), and evoke stronger neural activations in the reward region of the brain (Hassall et al., 2016). Therefore, these findings are consistent with the general notion that self-relevant items often have higher intrinsic value within individuals' subjective value systems compared to stimuli related to other people (Northoff, 2016). However, it is somewhat difficult to apply this to the nonevaluative self-referential reward effect described above, as participants were not required to relate the incoming rewards to the self. This theoretical gap could be bridged by consideration of the importance of attention in processing. Given the attention capture known to follow the perception of self-cues, this may enhance resource-intensive processing in self-referential processing contexts, such as owning objects and making outcome choices. This should elicit stronger pursuit motivation for selfrelevant rewards relative to other-relevant rewards and improve subsequent task performance.

Supporting this reasoning, our study argues that selfreferential reward effect can be described as a classical "endowment effect" (Hassall et al., 2016) that is dependent on the accessibility of attentional resources (van den Bos et al., 2010). Elaboration of incoming stimuli tends to be a process requiring additional attentional resources. For instance, previous studies have reported that distraction can influence the processing of emotional stimuli, as well as emotional regulation strategies (Paul et al., 2013; Li and Yuan, 2018). Moreover, studies on self-referential memory have observed that separating attention dramatically lowered recognition (Gardiner and Richardson-Klavehn, 2000; Gardiner et al., 2001; Turk et al., 2013). Such findings indicated that elaborative self-referential memory representations depended, to a greater extent, on the application of attentional resources at encoding compared to representations associated with other people. Additionally, Hickey and his colleagues have also demonstrated that distracted attention impairs the motivating effects of stimuli associated with rewards (Hickey et al., 2006, 2009, 2010). Specifically, participants' performance decreased when target stimuli were accompanied by distracting stimuli during a visual search task. These findings suggested that available attentional resources can impact the self-referential effect during the processing of rewards. Hence, we speculated that attentional allocation may be the mechanism that enables the existence of the self-referential reward effect, in which self-owned rewards evoke stronger pursuit motivation than other-owned rewards in full-attention conditions. However, distracted attention could impair this effect due to limited attentional resources.

To further confirm this speculation, the present study included two studies (using monetary and social rewards) to identify whether inadequate resources have a selectively deleterious role on the self-referential reward effect. More specifically, we predicted that self-relevant monetary rewards might require resource-intensive processing and would therefore be affected by distracted-attention (DA) manipulations (Study 1). Consequently, we expected that only monetarily rewarded visual searches would decrease under DA conditions and not unrewarded visual searches. Furthermore, we examined whether there was a similar impairing effect of distracted attention on the self-referential social reward effect in Study 2.

## STUDY 1

#### Sample Population and Design

In this study, 89 right-handed college students (42 males and 47 females aged 17–23 years) were included. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no known neurological impairments. Additionally, all participants were volunteers from Hunan Normal University and received academic credit in their undergraduate psychology courses for participation. We obtained specific informed consent from each participant for publishing information or images that could potentially reveal their identities in an online open-access publication. A 2 (referential cues: self-referential cue, otherreferential cue) × 3 (reward cues: high monetary reward cue, low monetary reward cue, non-reward cue) × 2 (attentional condition: distracting stimulus, no distracting stimulus) withinsubjects design was employed. All experimental procedures were conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committee of Hunan Normal University. After fully understanding the study, each participant signed an informed consent form.

## Stimuli and Tasks

#### Self-Association Task

Prior to the experiment, each participant was provided a name of an acquaintance with whom they were unfamiliar but greeted upon meeting. Throughout the coupling task, the red circle and triangle geometric shapes were, respectively assigned to labels representing the participant and the acquaintance in two sessions. For instance, participants were informed that "the triangle is your acquaintance" and "the circle represents yourself " (Sui et al., 2012). Among all participants, the orders of the shape-labeled pairs presented were randomized, and the associations between shape and label were counterbalanced. Following the associative directions, participants underwent a shape-label matched pair. A shape (covering 3.5◦ × 3.5◦ visual angle) was presented above a white central fixation cross (0.8◦ × 0.8◦ visual angle). Of the two labels, one (the name of the participant and their acquaintance) (covering 1.76◦ /2.52◦ × 1.76◦ of visual angle) was shown beneath the fixation cross. Participants were assigned the tasks of determining whether the shape-label pair was equivalent as initially shown or if the shape and label were altered. Participants were informed that they could only go on to the next stage if they responded correctly in all of the trials; otherwise, the cycle was repeated.

#### Visual Search Task

fpsyg-09-02723 January 5, 2019 Time: 10:56 # 3

The visual search arrays included 10 object outlines (line thickness of 0.3◦ visual angle), each appearing equidistant (9.1◦ ) from a central fixation point and from the other. Objects were either diamonds (4.2◦ × 4.2◦ ) or circles (3.4◦ diameter), while each display contained only a singular uniquely shaped item. The unique item was either a diamond (while all other stimuli were circles) or a circle (while all other stimuli were diamonds). Among 80% of the trials, one of the homogenously shaped nontarget items were of unique color, such as red (with all other objects green) or vice versa. For each trial, distractor and target colors were determined randomly. A gray line, which was randomly oriented vertically or horizontally, was contained for each object (0.3◦ × 1.5◦ ). The sequence of events on the visual search task is presented in **Figure 1**. The task began with a fixation cross presented for 500ms, followed by a cue for 1000ms. Each potential reward size differed on three levels, as stated by the number of parallel lines in the cue. Absence of a reward was identified by an empty white circle, while a low reward (a value of 10 Yuan) was identified by a white circle with a horizontal line and a high reward (a value of 20 Yuan) was identified by a white circle with two horizontal lines. After a random interval of 600–1000 ms, the visual search task was presented for 4000ms. Feedback stimuli were shown for 500 ms following a variable target-feedback interval of 800–1000 ms, based on the reward magnitude for

the present trial and the participant's response. In the case of no-reward trials, a "√ " or "×" was presented as a feedback stimulus based on whether the button pressed was correct. In monetary reward trials where participants provided quick correct responses, monetary rewards of 10 or 20 Chinese Yuan banknotes were given as feedback stimuli. Finally, the cumulative points of the participant and their acquaintances were presented for 500 ms. During that task, participants were informed of their performance by viewing the cumulative points for reward feedback stimuli.

#### Procedure

The full experiment includes the self-association task and the visual search task. Before the experiment, all participants completed some exercises to become familiarized with the procedures. During the self-association task, participants formed two special pairs between shapes (the red circle and triangle geometric shapes) and labels (the self and acquaintance). They were then given a two-minute break, after which the participants were asked to complete the visual search task for monetary reward. Finally, participants were asked to complete a 7-point subjective rating regarding motivation for the three types of reward cues; for example, answering "how much do you desire to correctly respond to the cue stimuli?" with ratings ranging from 1 (no desire at all) to 7 (strongly desire). Stimuli presentation and the recording of RTs and ACC were accomplished using E-Prime

2.0 software (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA). The full experiment took about 25 min.

## Data Analysis

fpsyg-09-02723 January 5, 2019 Time: 10:56 # 4

Using repeated-measures of analysis of variance (ANOVA), RTs and accuracy were separately analyzed based on withinsubjects factors, which were referential cues (self-referential and other-referential), reward cues (high monetary reward, low monetary reward, and no reward), and attentional condition (distracting stimulus, no distracting stimulus). All data analysis was performed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) Version 20.0 (IBM Inc., New York, United States). Partial η 2 was shown as an effect size estimate. For all significant interactions, we conducted post hoc pairwise comparisons with Bonferroni adjustments.

## Results

The analyses of subjective rating scores revealed that the 20 Yuan (\$2.88) was more strongly desired than the 10 Yuan RMB (\$1.44), t1,87) = 6.13, p < 0.001. Also, the 10 Yuan RMB was more strongly desired than a same-sized blank paper, t(1,87) = 13.56, p < 0.001. These results suggest that monetary reward was operationalized successfully.

**Table 1** presents the mean accuracy rates and RTs. The accuracy rates reveal a main effect for the reward cues (F(2,176) = 27.05, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.24), with significantly higher average accuracy rates in the monetary reward condition compared to the no-reward condition; however, there were no significant differences between the high and low monetary reward conditions. Additionally, a main effect of referential cues (F(1,88) = 51.60, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.37) suggested a significantly higher average accuracy rate for the self-referential cues than for the acquaintance-referential cues. There was also a significant three-way interaction between reward cues, referential cues, and attentional condition, F(2,176) = 4.32, p < 0.05, η 2 p = 0.11. Further simple effect analysis revealed that in the undistracted condition, participants demonstrated higher average accuracy rates for the self-referential cues than for the other-referential cues under three kinds of rewards conditions (Fs(1,88) = 15.60– 18.75, ps < 0.001). However, in the distracted conditions, such self-referential reward effect was reduced under both high and low monetary rewards conditions (F(1,88) = 10.08, p < 0.001, F(1,88) = 15.60, p < 0.001) rather than in the no-rewards conditions, F(1,88) = 2.79, p > 0.05 (**Figure 2A**).

Findings from the RTs show a main effect of reward cue (F(2,176) = 18.74, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.18), presenting an associated increase in RTs in the monetary reward condition compared to no-reward condition, as well as faster RTs for high monetary rewards than for low monetary rewards. Additionally, a main effect of referential cue was observed (F(1,88) = 8.60, p < 0.01, ηρ 2 = 0.09), suggesting significantly faster RTs for the self-referential cues than the acquaintance-referential cues. The main effect of attentional condition was significant (F(1,88) = 24.97, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.22), suggesting significantly faster RTs for the target stimuli in the undistracted conditions than in the distracted conditions. In addition, we observed a significant interaction between reward cue and referential cue (F(2,176) = 10.09, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.10). Further simple effect analysis revealed that in the high and low monetary reward conditions, the participants demonstrated faster RTs for the self-referential cues than for the acquaintance-referential cues (F(1,88) = 27.12, p < 0.001, F(1,88) = 7.39, p < 0.01). However, such differences in RTs were not observed in the no-reward condition (F(1,88) = 1.87, p > 0.05). Furthermore, we found an associated interaction between referential cue and attentional condition (F(2,176) = 15.56, p < 0.01, η 2 p = 0.11). Additional simple effect analysis revealed that the self-referential reward effect was only observed in the undistracted conditions (F(1,88) = 14.74, p < 0.001) and not in the distracted conditions (F(1,88) = 1.72, p > 0.05, **Figure 2B**).

### Discussion

The findings from Study 1 indeed show an obvious self-referential reward effect, suggesting that participants' performances are better (e.g., higher accuracy rate and faster RTs) when earning self-owned monetary rewards as opposed to acquaintance-owned monetary rewards. Importantly, this self-referential reward effect was impaired under distracted attentional conditions. This was observed when self-referential cues, rather than acquaintancereferential cues, were associated with reduced performance when distracting stimuli were present. The pattern of responses observed during the full-attention condition was similar to findings from van den Bos et al. (2010). Specifically, they found that ownership effects are observed during recognition along with recollective experience. Additionally, the authors suggested that the advantage for self-relevant items would diminish when participants were completing a task with divided attention at the time of encoding. Turk et al. (2013) reported

that while a self-referential effect in memory was observed under full-attention conditions, the memory benefit was lost during divided attention at the time of encoding. In the present study, self-owned rewards evoked stronger pursuit motivations and were associated with better performance than otherowned rewards in the undistracted conditions. However, the self-referential reward effects were impaired in the distracted conditions. According to literature on the general attentional requirements of elaborative encoding, as well as ownership studies on the patterns of brain activation (Cunningham et al., 2008; Huang et al., 2009; Krigolson et al., 2013), the present findings revealed that ownership effects occur solely when adequate attentional resources are available. However, other studies have reported the similarities and differences between monetary and social reward processing. For example, compared to monetary rewards, participants were given greater cognitive efforts for social rewards (Rademacher et al., 2014), and autistic children showed weaker attentional bias and lower performance for social rewards (Stavropoulos and Carver, 2014; Neuhaus et al., 2015). Recently, Wang et al. (2017) suggested that social and monetary rewards effectively improved performance for all age groups (children, adolescents, and adults) as reward size increased in the selection reaction time task, and social rewards showed resilient subjective incentive power compared to monetary rewards among children and adolescents. In sum, these studies indicated that monetary and social rewards have not only similar enhancement effects for cognitive processes, but also some considerable differences in intensity. However, it remains unclear whether the impairing effect of distraction was observed in the processing of social rewards.

## STUDY 2

#### Participants and Design

In total, 108 right-handed college-aged participants (58 males and 50 females aged 16–24 years) were included in the study. All of the participants' vision was either normal or corrected-to-normal, and the subjects had no known neurological impairments. Additionally, all participants were volunteers who received academic credit in their undergraduate psychology courses at Hunan Normal University in exchange for participating. A 2 (referential cues: self-referential, other-referential) × 3 (reward cues: high social reward, low social reward, non-reward) × 2 (attentional condition: distracting stimulus, no distracting stimulus) within-subjects design was employed. We expected that when comparing undistracted attentional conditions, the task performance in the presence of both self-referential and acquaintance-referential cues would be reduced in the distracted attentional conditions. All experimental procedures were conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committee of Hunan Normal University. After fully understanding the study, each participant signed an informed consent form.

## Stimuli and Procedure

The same experimental methods from Study 1 were used in Study 2, and the SID task was adopted to examine how selfreference affected the processing of social rewards given different attentional resources. The social rewards were 10 or 20 cartoon smiley faces (low and high social rewards, respectively), and the no-reward stimulus was a neutral cartoon face (Rademacher et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2017). Hence, the only difference from Study 1 was the reward cues.

#### Results

The analyses of the subjective rating scores revealed that the 20 cartoon smiley faces were more strongly desired than the 10 cartoon smiley faces (t(1,106) = 13.11, p < 0.001), and the 10 cartoon smiley faces were more strongly desired than the neutral faces (t(1,106) = 14.82, p < 0.001). These results suggest that the social reward was operationalized successfully.

**Table 2** presents the RTs and mean accuracy rates. The accuracy rates show a main effect of reward cue (F(2,214) = 22.70, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.18), presenting significantly higher average accuracy rates for the social rewards compared to no reward, as well as significantly higher average accuracy rates for high social rewards than low social rewards. Additionally, a main effect of referential cue (F(1,107) = 36.57, p < 0.001, ηρ 2 = 0.26) suggested a significantly higher average accuracy rate for the self-referential cues than for the acquaintance-referential cues. There were no

TABLE 2 | Mean and SD of accuracy rate (%) and RTs (ms) in study 2.

other significant main effects or interaction effects (each p > 0.13; **Figure 3A**).

The results for the RTs showed a main effect of reward cue (F(2,214) = 21.23, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.17), presenting significantly increased RTs for the social rewards compared to no reward and faster RTs for high social rewards than for low social rewards. Additionally, a main effect of referential cue was observed (F(1,107) = 8.36, p < 0.01, η 2 p = 0.10), suggesting associated faster RTs for the self-referential cues compared to the acquaintancereferential cues. A main effect of attentional condition was also observed (F(1,107) = 4.20, p < 0.05, η 2 p = 0.09), revealing significantly faster RTs in the undistracted conditions than in the distracted conditions. Additionally, we observed a significant three-way interaction between reward cue, referential cue, and attentional condition (F(2,214) = 6.72, p < 0.01, η 2 p = 0.06). Further simple effect analysis revealed that in the undistracted conditions, participants demonstrated faster RTs with the selfreferential cues than with the other-referential cues under the low and high social reward conditions (F(1,107) = 6.56, p < 0.01; F(1,107) = 16.36, p < 0.001). However, a self-referential reward effect was not observed in the no-reward conditions. Moreover, in the distracted conditions, self-referential reward effects were not observed for any of the reward conditions (Fs(1,107) = 0.33–0.58, ps > 0.05; **Figure 3B**).

#### Discussion

As observed in the first study, the findings from Study 2 further demonstrated that the self-referential social reward effect also was impaired under the distracted conditions. This evidence showed that self-reference could also promote the pursuit of motivation for social reward, but only under full-attentional conditions. However, previous research has shown that individuals demonstrate different behavioral and neural responses while pursuing monetary and social rewards (Stavropoulos and Carver, 2014; Neuhaus et al., 2015). For example, Rademacher et al. (2014) found that participants applied greater cognitive efforts toward earning monetary reward cues compared to social reward cues. Recently, Wang et al. (2017) revealed that both social and monetary rewards successfully improved responding in all age groups (children, adolescents, and adults) as reward size increased in the selection reaction time task, and social rewards showed resilient subjective incentive power compared to monetary rewards among children and adolescents. As seen in Study 1 with monetary rewards, Study 2 also found an obvious self-referential reward effect in the pursuit of social rewards, though divided attention impaired this advantage. However, there were some differences from Study 1. Study 1 found that the impairing effect of divided attention was only observed in the no-reward conditions and not in the low or high reward conditions. Nevertheless, in Study 2, this impairment was observed in all reward conditions. These findings revealed that the impairing effect of distracted attention on self-referential monetary reward effect was modulated by reward value rather than self-referential social reward effect.

#### GENERAL DISCUSSION

In the present study, we explored the extent to which distracted attention during monetary and social reward pursuit impacts

the reward advantage usually associated with self-owned items (Turk et al., 2011b; Krigolson et al., 2013). It was found that under undistracted conditions, an "ownership effect" (i.e., better performance for self-owned than for acquaintance-owned rewards) emerged in the low and high monetary conditions, whereas no effect of ownership was observed in the noreward conditions. This pattern of responses in the undistracted attention condition replicated the behavioral findings from Krigolson et al. (2013), which reported that ownership effects were observed in a simple gambling task during which participants could "win" or "lose" prizes for themselves or for someone else. Moreover, this self-referential reward effect was observed in the pursuit of social rewards.

Given the effortful nature of elaborative encoding, it was expected that the advantage of self-referenced (i.e., self-owned) rewards would be diminished when participants were completing a distracted-attention task in pursuit of rewards. This pattern was found, with no ownership effect emerging under conditions of undistracted attention. It seems plausible to conclude from this pattern that attentional resources are required when engaging in elaborative reward processing for self-owned objects, which is not possible under conditions of serious resource depletion. This pattern of reward performance augments the evidence that selfreferential reward processing, relative to the processing of objects associated with other people, triggers rich, elaborative reward processing (Sui et al., 2015a,b), which is attentionally demanding. To our knowledge, the current study provides the first evidence that the self-reference effect in reward processing is underpinned by differences in attentional processing during the pursuit of rewards.

Interestingly, pursuit of acquaintance-owned rewards was unaffected by distracted attention, suggesting that relatively little elaboration of other-owned rewards takes place, even under undistracted attentional conditions. It is possible that with more power, a small effect of distracted attention would also have been observed in the pursuit of acquaintance-owned rewards, as some elaboration would be expected to support reward processing in this condition. However, the interaction between self-reference and attention was expected, because distracted attention should have a larger effect on self-referential reward processing, reducing the elaboration with which it is distinguished. Importantly, the value of the reward could modulate the influences of self-reference and attention on the pursuit of monetary rewards rather than social rewards. This impairing effect of distracted attention on self-referential reward effect was weak or nonexistent with greater value of monetary rewards. However, this modulation of reward value was not observed in the pursuit of social rewards. We speculate that college students might not be as sensitive to social rewards as they are to monetary rewards. College students are gradually integrating into society and pay increasing attention to money due to their increasing economic independence. Therefore, the value of monetary rewards has an advantage for motivating behavior, compared to social rewards such as cartoon smiles, among college students (Wang et al., 2017). Moreover, this could also be because the incentive value of the social reward was reduced by repeated presentation (Demurie et al., 2012).

These novel findings suggesting that attention is crucial for the self-referential reward effects casts new light on the potential links between the ways in which the self influences human cognition. In particular, the link between the dependence on attention for self-reference effects and the well-known attentional-capturing effect of self-cues during reward processing is an interesting theoretical angle. The two effects could be causally related, as the attention recruited by self-cues could be the mechanism by which resource-dependent elaborative processing and proper motivation were evoked. Cues relating to other people, which do not attract the same degree of attention, could fail to benefit from these reward-enhancement processes; hence, distracted attention has little effect on pursuit motivation by other-relevant rewards. Moreover, this modulation of attention could be explained by the parallel relationship between self and reward, as the selfreferential reward effect was indeed affected by the availability of attentional resources. However, the present study did not assess reward seeking motivation. According to reinforcement sensitivity theory, individuals show differences in subjective sensitivity and behavioral approaches toward earning the same reward (Jackson, 2003). Thus, future studies on self-referential reward effects should consider individual differences in reward sensitivity.

## CONCLUSION

The current study indicated that the processes underlying the monetary and social rewards of elaborative encoding and pursuit in response to self-cues are attentionally demanding. While an ownership effect is elicited under undistracted attentional conditions, this self-referential reward effect was impaired when attention was divided by distracting stimuli. Moreover, the impairment caused by distracted attention was weaker or nonexistent along when the value of monetary rewards, rather than social rewards, increased. The present study offers clear evidence that the reward enhancement associated with selfreferential reward processing is dependent on the availability of attentional resources.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

JZ and YZ designed the experiments and wrote the manuscript. JZ recruited participants and collected the data. YZ performed the data analyses.

## FUNDING

This study was supported in part by grants from the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (2018JJ3246).

#### REFERENCES

fpsyg-09-02723 January 5, 2019 Time: 10:56 # 8

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2019 Zhu and Zhan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Increasing the Difference in Decision Making for Oneself and for Others by Stimulating the Right Temporoparietal Junction

Yinling Zhang, Siyang Chen, Xinmu Hu and Xiaoqin Mai\*

Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

The right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) has been thought to be associated with the difference in self-other decision making. In the present study, using noninvasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), we examined whether stimulating the rTPJ could modulate the self-other decision-making difference. We found that after receiving anodal stimulation of the rTPJ, participants were more likely to choose a high-value item for others than for themselves in the situations where the win probability of the high-value item was equal to or greater than that of a low-value item, indicating that elevating the cortical excitability of the rTPJ might increase the self-other decisionmaking difference in certain decision contexts. Our results suggest that decision making for others depends on neural activity in the rTPJ and regulation of the excitability of the rTPJ can influence the self-other decision-making difference.

#### Edited by:

Jiajin Yuan, Southwest University, China

#### Reviewed by:

XianXin Meng, Nanyang Normal College, China Changming Chen, Xinyang Normal University, China

> \*Correspondence: Xiaoqin Mai<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 17 October 2018 Accepted: 18 January 2019 Published: 06 February 2019

#### Citation:

Zhang Y, Chen S, Hu X and Mai X (2019) Increasing the Difference in Decision Making for Oneself and for Others by Stimulating the Right Temporoparietal Junction. Front. Psychol. 10:185. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00185 Keywords: social neuroscience, decision making, self-other decision making, temporoparietal junction (TPJ), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)

## INTRODUCTION

In our social lives, we not only need to make decisions for ourselves but also often anticipate or make decisions for others. Indeed, decision making for others is the main content of social activities such as finance, medical treatment, consulting, and management, and acting for others in making risky decisions has gradually become an integral part of people's social and economic lives. In recent years, the difference in self-other decision-making has attracted the attention of various researchers, and some research results and theories have emerged. However, few studies have directly explored the brain mechanisms of the difference in decision making between oneself and others.

While, some studies in the field of risky decision making have examined the self-other decisionmaking difference, the results are inconsistent. Hsee and Weber (1997) found that people estimated that others were more likely than themselves to choose uncertain risk options, regardless of whether the choice was between gains or between losses. Using a risk decision-making task with a gain frame, Stone et al. (2002) found that anticipated regret increased risk aversion, but they found no significant difference between decision making for oneself and decision making for friends. Fernandez-Duque and Wifall (2007) compared participates' gambling behavior for themselves and advice giving to others regarding gambling, and found that participants showed more risk-taking tendencies in making decisions for themselves and relied less on objective probabilities when giving advice to others. Such inconsistencies arise because risk preference may be modulated by the gain/loss frame and risk probability (Liu et al., 2010, 2014; Duan et al., 2012). One study has found that people are less risk averse in a gain situation and less risk seeking in a loss situation when making decisions for a stranger than when making decisions for themselves (Zhang et al., 2017).

These findings suggest that we cannot generally say whether people are more risk adverse or more risk seeking when making decisions for others than when making decisions for themselves. Rather, we must consider the contextual characteristics of decision tasks.

Researchers have also proposed some theoretical explanations for the inconsistency of risk preference in self-other decision making. For example, Loewenstein et al. (2001) propose the riskas-feelings hypothesis that people's response to risk anticipation is influenced by cognitive assessment and emotional response, with emotional response playing a decisive role in this process. The discrepancy between making decisions for oneself and predicting others' decision making is due to the "vividness" of others. The more vivid the other person is, the stronger the emotional response, which will affect the distinction in risk preference. Beisswanger et al. (2003) believe that compared with decision making for oneself, decision making on behalf of friends is associated with less anticipation of negativeemotion involvement and thus less risk aversion. Fernandez-Duque and Wifall (2007) found asymmetry in executor-observer risk decision making and proposed that when deciding for themselves, people rely more on empirical systems involving emotional and intuitive processing than on rational systems involving logical and analytical processing. This has been supported by some brain imaging studies, and the difference in decision making for oneself and that for others is reflected in the activation of the brain areas related to the emotional/empirical system and the cognitive/rational system. That is, decision making for oneself is more sensitive to rewards and perceived risks than decision making for others, as reflected in the greater involvement of the reward system and emotional-related brain areas, such as the ventral striatum, anterior cingulate gyrus, and amygdala (Albrecht et al., 2011; Jung et al., 2013). In contrast, decision making for others involves additional mentalizing and cognitive processing, as reflected in the activation of related brain areas, such as the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and the medial prefrontal cortex (Janowski et al., 2013; Jung et al., 2013).

The right TPJ is a key brain area involved in processing different perspectives, reflecting and speculating mental states (Murray et al., 2012; Schurz et al., 2014, 2015; Krall et al., 2016; Mai et al., 2016). It is also an important part of other-processing networks and plays a role in promoting self-other distinction (Jardri et al., 2011; Venkatasubramanian et al., 2011; Murray et al., 2015; Steinbeis, 2016). Although relatively few studies have directly examined the brain mechanisms of the self-other decision-making difference, some studies have found that the TPJ plays an important role in this difference (Janowski et al., 2013; Jung et al., 2013; Ogawa et al., 2018). In an fMRI study, Jung et al. (2013) used a gambling task to directly compare the differences in brain activity when making risky decisions for oneself and for others. They found that different neural processes were involved in making risky decisions for oneself and for others; specifically, the reward system was more active in decision making for oneself, while the TPJ was more active in decision making for others. Ogawa et al. (2018) used a classical Theory-of-Mind task in an fMRI study and identified the rTPJ associated with cognitive perspective taking. They then examined whether activity in the identified rTPJ during the risky decision task (i.e., lottery-choice task) was modulated by the parameters of the behavioral-choice model, and found that rTPJ activity in the Other condition (i.e., decision making for an anonymous other) was modulated by the difference in expected value of the two lottery options, suggesting that individuals' cognitive perspective taking operates in a more risk-neutral manner when making decision for others.

The transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a noninvasive brain stimulation technique, by which researchers can explore the casual relationship between neural activity in specific brain regions and cognitive function. It contains two electrodes, cathode and anode, which act on the cerebral cortex with weak current and regulate the activity of cerebral cortical nerve cells. Generally, the stimulation of anode electrode enhances the cortical excitability (i.e., anodal-excitation effect), while the cathode electrode causes an inhibition effect. The former is quite stable in cognitive studies (Jacobson et al., 2012). The tDCS has several advantages over other brain stimulation techniques. It is noninvasive, painless, safe, and easy to administer. The equipment is cheap and easily portable.

The purpose of the present study was to use tDCS to examine whether directly stimulating the rTPJ could modulate the selfother decision-making difference. In the present study, we used the gambling task adapted from the study of Jung et al. (2013). Considering that the decision context might affect the selfother decision-making difference, three decision situations were created in this task through two options in terms of value (high value and low value) and the probability of winning. The three decision situations are high-value option disadvantage, equal probability, and high-value option advantage. In the situation of high-value option disadvantage, choosing the high-value option is irrational and risky due to the high probability of loss; in the equal probability situation, choosing the high-value option is risky because of the high variability; and in the situation of high-value option advantage, choosing the high-value option is rational due to the high probability of winning. We hypothesized that elevating the cortical excitability of the rTPJ through anodal stimulation might increase the difference between decision making for oneself and that for others by inducing people to be more rational in making decisions for others; in contrast, inhibiting the excitability of the rTPJ through the cathodal stimulation was hypothesized have the opposite effect. Therefore, in the situations of high-value option disadvantage and equal probability, the anodal stimulation of the rTPJ would reduce the choice of the irrational or high-risk high-value option in decision making for others relative to decision making for oneself; in the situation of high-value option advantage, the anodal stimulation of the rTPJ would increase the choice of the rational high-value option in decision making for others.

## MATERIALS AND METHODS

#### Participants

Seventy-five adults (mean age 22.3 ± 1.7 years, 18 males) participated in this study as paid volunteers. They were randomly assigned to three groups of 25 participants each: the anodal, cathodal, or control sham. All participants were right-handed and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. None of them reported a history of psychiatric or neurological disorders or a family history of epilepsy or a personal history of epilepsy. This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the ethics committee of Department of Psychology at Renmin University of China. All participants gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the same ethics committee.

#### Experimental Procedure

fpsyg-10-00185 February 5, 2019 Time: 16:51 # 3

At the beginning of the experiment, each participant was informed to play the gambling game for him- or herself (self condition) and a stranger (other condition). They were given the phone numbers of 10 strangers and were asked to choose one of them. They would make decisions for the selected stranger in the following gambling game. In the condition of decision-making for oneself, each participant had 100 initial game points, and they were informed that the final game points were related to their own reward. In the condition of decision-making for others, the selected stranger also had 100 initial game points. Participants made decisions on behalf of the strangers and were told that the points they won for others would be converted into money and transferred to the stranger's phone account, which means making decisions for others has nothing to do with the interests of the participants themselves.

The experimental task was adapted from the gambling task designed by Jung et al. (2013) to examine the distinction between decision making for oneself and decision making for others. As illustrated in **Figure 1**, each trial began with a fixation cross presented on the screen for 2000 ms. Then, a word "for self " or "for other" in Chinese appeared for 1000 ms, which cued the participant to make decisions for themselves or to make decisions for others. Afterward, six squares distinguished by pink and blue were presented, with the numbers 10 and 90 below the squares. The color of the squares represented the number of points (that is, value) that participants would win or lose: the value of the pink square was 10 points (low value), and the value of the blue square was 90 points (high value). The number of squares indicated the probability of winning or losing the corresponding number of points. There were five probability situations: 17, 33, 50, 67, and 83%. Each participant was asked to choose the pink or blue square by pressing the F or J key on the keyboard with their left or right index fingers. Pressing the F key represented selecting the pink square and pressing the J key represented selecting the blue square. After the participant responded, a coin represented by a yellow disk appeared randomly on any one of the six squares. If the coin appeared in the selected color square, the participant gained the corresponding value (add 10 or 90 points); if it did not appear in the selected color square, the participant lost the corresponding value (minus 10 points or 90 points). For example, when the participant chose the blue square and the coin appeared in one of the blue squares, he or she would get 90 game points. If it appeared in the pink square, he or she would lose 90 game points. The next trial began when the participant pressed the space key.

The formal experiment started after 4 trials of practice for each participant. There were 60 trials for the formal experiment, two decision roles (for themselves or others) and 5 high-value option probabilities (17, 33, 50, 67, and 83% chance of winning when choosing the blue square), resulting in 10 types of trials with 6 trials for each type. The order of the different types of trials was random. The stimuli were presented and behavioral data were recorded using E-Prime 2.0 software (PST, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA, United States).

#### tDCS Protocol

The tDCS was delivered by a stimulator (DC-STIMULATOR MC, NeuroConn GmbH, Germany). The current stimulated the cerebral cortex through a pair of sponge coated electrodes (5 cm × 7 cm in size) soaked in saline. To stimulate the rTPJ, the anodal or cathodal electrode was placed between CP6 and C6 according to the international 10–20 EEG system and previous fMRI studies (Jurcak et al., 2007; Jung et al., 2013). This area covers the MNI coordinates [58, −66, 24] of the rTPJ reported in previous fMRI research (Jung et al., 2013). The reference electrode was placed on the left cheek. For the anodal and cathodal groups, a relatively weak direct current (1.5 mA) was continuously delivered for 20 min. For the reason of physical safety, current intensity is usually limited to 2 mA. If the duration is long enough, the excitability of cerebral cortex can reach more than 1 h after stimulation (Jacobson et al., 2012). In studies exploring the social cognitive function of the rTPJ, setting the current intensity at 1.5 mA is sufficient (Mai et al., 2016; Tang et al., 2018). For the sham group, although the electrode was placed over the rTPJ for 20 min, the current stimulation lasted only 15 s. The fade in and fade out time were both 15 s for each stimulation condition.

## Data Analysis

In this gambling task, the probability of the two options was variable, while the value attached to the option was fixed, and the difference multiplier of the value was greater than the maximum difference multiplier of the probability condition (i.e., the value of the blue/pink square was 90/10 greater than the 5/1). According to the equate-to-differentiate (ETD) strategy (Li, 2004; Li, 1994, Unpublished), individuals tend to focus on the high-value option for the invariant value dimension (i.e., the blue square of 90 points). Therefore, in the data analysis, we used the frequency of choosing the high-value option as the dependent variable.

In addition, the two value options were significantly different and fixed, and the win probability of each option varied between 17 and 83%. In previous research using this task, the risk level of the options was based only on the option values (Jung et al., 2013). However, the risk level of an option should take into account both the value and the probability. High-risk options thus generally refer to options with high value and a low probability of winning (Krain et al., 2006; Smith et al., 2009). According to the expected utility theory (von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1947), the rational choice in decision making is to choose the option with greatest expected utility. When the probability changes, the expected utility of the option also changes. The high-value option thus does not always represent the irrational risk-taking alternative to the rational choice. Therefore, in this study, we considered the size of value, the probability of winning, and the

expected utility. According to the probability of winning of the high-value option, we divided them into three types of probability situations: high-value option with low probability/disadvantage situation (17% and 33%), equal probability situation (50%), and high-value option with high probability/advantage situation (67 and 83%). When the probability of wining the high-value option is lower (17 and 33%), the high-value option is the irrational, high-risk choice with a high probability of loss; when the probability of winning the high-value option is 50%, the highvalue option is the high-risk choice; and when the probability of winning high-value option is greater (67% and 83%), the highvalue option is the rational choice with a high probability of winning (see **Table 1**).

The frequency of choosing the high-value option was subjected to a two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with one between-subjects factor (tDCS groups: cathodal, sham, and anodal) and one within-subject factor (decision-maker role: for self and for other) evaluated for the three probability situations: high-value option disadvantage, equal probability, and high-value option advantage. The data were statistically analyzed using SPSS software (version 21.0, IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, United States).

#### RESULTS

In the situation of high-value option disadvantage, the 3 (tDCS group: cathodal, sham, and anodal) × 2 (decision maker role: for self and for other) repeated-measures ANOVA did not show any significant main effect or interaction effect on the frequency of choosing the high-value option, indicating that there

TABLE 1 | Meaning of the options under the different probability situations.

was no self-other difference in decision making in each tDCS group in the situation of high-value option disadvantage, i.e., when choosing the high-value option was irrational and risky (**Figure 2A**).

In the situation of equal probability, the main effect of decision-maker role was significant, F(1, 72) = 5.74, p = 0.019, η 2 p = 0.07, indicating that the frequency of choosing the highvalue option for others was higher than that for oneself. The interaction effect between decision-maker role and tDCS group was marginally significant (F(2, 72) = 2.48, p = 0.091, η 2 p = 0.07). Pairwise comparisons were conducted to further examine the self-other difference in decision making for each tDCS group. The results showed that in the anodal group, the frequency of choosing the high-value option for others (M = 0.67, SD = 0.26) was significantly higher than that for oneself (M = 0.49, SD = 0.25, p = 0.003), but this self-other difference was not found for the cathodal and sham groups. In addition, to examine the difference in decision making among the three tDCS groups for each decision-maker role, a one-way ANOVA was conducted separately between decision making for oneself and decision making for others. The results showed that the frequency of

choosing the high-value option was different among the three tDCS groups only for decision making for others (F(2, 72) = 3.35, p = 0.041, η 2 p = 0.09). Post-hoc comparisons found that the frequency of choosing the high-value option for others was higher in the anodal group (M = 0.67, SD = 0.26) than in the sham group (M = 0.52, SD = 0.21), marginally significant, p = 0.067. Moreover, in the anodal group, the frequency of choosing the high-value option for others was more than 50% (t (24) = 3.32, p = 0.003, d = 0.92), see **Figure 2B**.

In the situation of high-value option advantage, only the main effect of decision-maker role was marginally significant (p = 0.093). Based on our hypothesis, we focused on the comparison between the "self " and "other" condition in each stimulation group. In order to avoiding missing some meaningful information due to just relying on omnibus F-test, we conducted pairwise comparisons to further examine the self-other difference in decision making for each tDCS group. The results showed that in the anodal group, the frequency of choosing the highvalue option for others (M = 0.96, SD = 0.06) was significantly higher than that for oneself (M = 0.90, SD = 0.14, p = 0.024), but this self-other difference was not found in the cathodal and sham groups (see **Figure 2C**). In addition, one-way ANOVA was conducted to examine the difference in decision making among three tDCS groups for each decision-maker role, but the frequency of choosing the high-value option was not different among the three tDCS groups for both decision-maker roles.

#### DISCUSSION

The present study examined the effects of regulating the excitability in the rTPJ by tDCS on self-other differences in risky decision making. We found that in different situations of win probability, the participants behaved differently when we elevated the excitability of their rTPJ. Specifically, in the situation of high-value option disadvantage, in which choosing the highvalue option was irrational and risky, exciting or inhibiting rTPJ activation did not influence decision making for oneself and others. Further, in the situation of equal probability, in which the high-value option had high risk, increasing the rTPJ excitability made participants more likely to choose the highrisk item for others (exceeding risk-neutral value 50%) than for themselves. This finding indicates that individuals are more adventurous when making decisions for others, which is contrary to our hypothesis. Finally, in the situation of high-value option advantage, in which the high-value item was the rational option, exciting the rTPJ made participants choose more high-value items for others than for themselves. It suggests that individuals are more rational when making decisions for others, which is consistent with the hypothesis. Overall, these results suggest that the rTPJ plays an important role in decision making for others and that regulation of the excitability of the rTPJ can influence the self-other decision-making difference.

When elevating the cortical excitability of participants' rTPJ, the frequency of choosing the high-value option for others was significantly higher than that for oneself in the situations of high-value option advantage and equal probability, suggesting that the rTPJ is involved in self-other differences in decision making. When making decisions for others, individuals as decision-makers need to distinguish themselves from others, realize that they are making choice on behalf of others (i.e., change perspectives), and even consider the impact of potential outcomes on others (i.e., theory of mind). Brain imaging studies has also found that the TPJ is related to perspective taking (Santiesteban et al., 2012; Schurz et al., 2015) and theory of mind (Schurz et al., 2014; Krall et al., 2016; Mai et al., 2016). It is more active in making decisions for others (Jung et al., 2013).

However, the high-value potion is the rational choice in the high-value option advantage situation, but the high-risk choice in the equal probability situation. It indicated that participants made more rational decisions for others than for themselves in the high-value option advantage situation, while they made more risky decisions for others than for themselves in the equal probability situation. These results are contradictory with each

other and partly contrary to our hypothesis. Nevertheless, if we ignore the context-dependent meaning of the option and focus on the option itself, we can find that the frequency of choosing high-value option with high potential gain and high potential loss values was in fact greater for others than for oneself in both situations. It seems to be caused by the weakening of the impact of the high potential loss (may be the aversion to potential loss) in the "other" condition. Jung et al. (2013) reported that right amygdala activation was positively correlated with individuals' probability of choosing high-value items for themselves, while the activity of the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) was positively correlated with the probability of choosing high-value items for strangers. In addition, further analysis found a stronger functional connectivity between the rTPJ and the left DMPFC in decision making for others than that for oneself (Jung et al., 2013), while amygdala activation could be regulated by the DMPFC through the functional connectivity between these two brain areas (Banks et al., 2007; Phillips et al., 2008; Leiberg et al., 2011; Potvin et al., 2017). Brain imaging studies of risky decision making have found that the amygdala is not only sensitive to potential loss in decision making but also closely related to loss aversion (Bechara et al., 1999; De Martino et al., 2010; Sokolhessner et al., 2013; Phelps et al., 2014). Therefore, we believe that the TPJ may not only play a role in perspective taking and interpreting other's mental state, but also may indirectly regulate some cognitive processes through its connection with the DMPFC. Moreover, the activation of the left DMPFC can negatively regulate amygdala activation, which inhibits the avoiding response to potential high losses of the high-value option and makes individuals more likely to choose it. Hence, we can explain the seemingly contradictory results in this way. In situations in which the win probability of the high-value item is equal to or greater than that of the lowvalue item, the anodal stimulation of the rTPJ may reduce the emotional response to the potential loss of the high-value option by increasing the inhibition of the DMPFC on the amygdala in decision making for others, and thus increase the frequency of choosing high-value items for others rather than for oneself.

In the high-value option disadvantage situation, anodal stimulation of the rTPJ did not increase the self-other decisionmaking difference. One explanation is that because the high-value item is the irrational and high-risk choice in this situation, a floor effect may arise owing to the low frequency of choosing the high-value item. Another possible explanation is that amygdala activity is strong when the win probability of the high-value item is low and the loss probability is high (i.e., the disadvantage situation for the high-value item), and although exogenous enhancement of rTPJ activity can promote the regulation of the amygdala by the DMPFC, the amygdala activity remains strong enough to induce the individuals to avoid options with a high probability of a large loss. Therefore, the role of anodic stimulation in the situation of high-value option disadvantage is not obvious.

We did not observe any cathodal effect on the participants' decision making, which was inconsistent with our assumptions that cathodal stimulation of the rTPJ could reduce the difference in self-other decision making. This may be because there was no self-other decision-making difference in the sham group. Therefore, although inhibiting the rTPJ activation can reduce the difference in self-other decision making, it is impossible to show such a reduction in this study due to the floor effect. In addition, the inhibition effect of negative stimulation may usually be influenced by the initial activation state of neurons and the functional compensation of related brain regions in cognitive studies (Jacobson et al., 2012). The left TPJ (LTPJ) is also involved in theory of mind (Gallagher et al., 2000; Samson et al., 2004; Ye et al., 2015), and it is functionally connected with the prefrontal lobe in decision making for others (Janowski et al., 2013). Thus, the LTPJ might play a compensatory role in inhibiting the rTPJ, resulting in a lack of behavioral changes when the cortical excitability of the rTJP is inhibited.

The self-other difference of decisions was not shown in the sham group for each of the decision situations. Previous studies have reported inconsistent results regarding risk preference in self-other decision making, which might be caused by the different decision contexts (Hsee and Weber, 1997; Stone et al., 2002; Fernandez-Duque and Wifall, 2007). Some researchers have found that the self-other difference in risk decision-making can be affected by the gain/loss framework, the decision makers' selfesteem level, and the mental distance between decision makers and others (Liu et al., 2010; Duan et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2017, 2018). Thus, the gambling task we applied in the present study may not be sensitive enough to examine differences in decision-making between for oneself and for others when no stimulation is applied to the rTPJ. The lack of a self-other decision-making difference in the sham group may restrict our investigation of the role of cathodal stimulation. Therefore, to better understand the function of the rTPJ, in future research, it is necessary to consider the possible factors that influence the self-other decision-making difference and design a task by which we can observe the difference in decision making between for oneself and for others when no stimulation is applied to the rTPJ.

There are some limitations to our study. First, we designed the sham stimulation group as a control group in which participants did not receive effective stimulation. But the general effect of the anodal stimulation on cerebral cortex cannot be ruled out. To help us better understand the specific function of the rTPJ, in the future studies we can stimulate another brain region to serve as a control region, such as the occipital cortex which does not associate directly with decision making or some other regions which are responsible for decision making in general but not specifically for self-other differences in decisions. In addition, the manipulation of "others" is relatively rough compared to real life. Prior studies have found that similarities, relationships, and preferences for others relate to different neural systems (Guroglu et al., 2008; Krienen et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2012; Braams et al., 2014; Zhao et al., 2016). Some researchers believe that the fundamental difference between oneself and others is mental distance (Liu et al., 2014). Braams et al. (2014) compared neural activity when participants engaged in gambling tasks for themselves, good friends, and disliked others and found that brain areas associated with social information processing,

such as the DMPFC and TPJ, showed greater activation with respect to the win or loss outcome of gambling for others than for themselves and friends. Therefore, to comprehensively examine the neural mechanisms of the self-other decisionmaking difference, further studies involving different mental distance between oneself and others are needed.

The present study validates the crucial role of the rTPJ in the self-other decision-making difference through elevating the cortical excitability suggesting that decision making for others depends on the neural activity in the rTPJ, which has important implications for us to understanding the function of the TPJ in self-other decision making. The TPJ may not only associate with perspective taking and theory of mind, but also indirectly regulate emotion responses through its functional connection with the medial prefrontal lobe. Combining the tDCS with other techniques that can record neural and peripheral physiological activity in future studies would help us further reveal the neural mechanism of decision making for others and understand specific

## REFERENCES

economic phenomena (e.g., loss aversion) from the perspective of decision making for oneself and others.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

XM and SC designed the study. SC, YZ, and XH collected and analyzed the data. YZ wrote the manuscript. XM and XH edited the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the paper for submission.

## FUNDING

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31771206), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (15XNLQ05).

Jardri, R., Pins, D., Lafargue, G., Very, E., Ameller, A., Delmaire, C., et al. (2011). Increased overlap between the brain areas involved in self-other distinction in schizophrenia. PLoS One 6:e17500. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017500

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2019 Zhang, Chen, Hu and Mai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# The Influence of Self-Relevance and Cultural Values on Moral Orientation

Junfeng Bian1 \*, Liang Li 2 \*, Jianzhou Sun2 , Jie Deng2 , Qianwei Li 2 , Xiaoli Zhang2 and Liangshi Yan2,3 \*

*1 Centre for Mental Health Education, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, China, 2 Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China, 3 Department of Psychology, Centre for Research of Cultural Psychology and Behavior, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China*

Moral orientation refers to moral values that have a consistent guiding orientation toward an individual's moral cognition and behavior. Gilligan (1982) proposed that individuals have two moral orientations, namely "justice" and "care." In the current study, we investigated the influence of self-relevance and cultural values on justice and care by using Single Attribute Implicit Association Test (SA-IAT). In Experiments 1 and 2, we adopted cultural icon prime paradigm to examine the effects of different self-referential stimuli (self, friend, and stranger) on implicit moral justice and care orientation under two cultural value conditions: traditionality, modernity, and neutral cultural values. Participants exhibited more difference toward different self-referential stimuli in the traditionality condition than in the modernity condition; the priming of traditional culture aggravated the differential order, whereas the priming of modernity weakened the differential order regarding implicitly just moral orientation. In the implicit care orientation, participants in the modern culture group exhibited the least difference to different self-referential stimuli compared with the other two groups, and the traditional group and the control group did not differ significantly. These findings indicate that psychological modernity weakens the degree of self-related effect in implicit justice and care orientation, whereas traditional culture aggravates the differential order in justice orientation. The current studies provide empirical support for theories relating moral orientation, also informing the literature on the role of self-relevance information and cultural values in moral decision making.

Keywords: moral orientation, justice, care, degree of self-reference, differential effect, cultural value

### Specialty section:

*This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

Received: *27 November 2018* Accepted: *29 January 2019* Published: *28 February 2019*

#### Citation:

Edited by: *Chao Liu,*

Reviewed by: *Youlong Zhan,*

*Technology, China Shengtao Sun,*

\*Correspondence: *Junfeng Bian<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Liangshi Yan<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
*Liang Li*

*Beijing Normal University, China*

*Hunan University of Science and*

*Shanghai Normal University, China*

*Bian J, Li L, Sun J, Deng J, Li Q, Zhang X and Yan L (2019) The Influence of Self-Relevance and Cultural Values on Moral Orientation. Front. Psychol. 10:292. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00292* INTRODUCTION

Moral orientation refers to moral values that have a consistent guiding orientation toward an individual's moral cognition and behavior and consists of two types: reward good cops and punish bad ones. Kyte (1996) suggested that moral orientation plays an integral role in moral decision-making.

Piaget and Kohlberg are recognized as representatives of the "justice" moral orientation. Kohlberg's (1976) proposed model for moral justice orientation focuses on adjudicating between individual interests or rights while solving moral dilemmas. This orientation depends on the application of fairness, reciprocity, and universal moral principles in the abstract features of ethical situations. At the pretraditional level of moral reasoning, individuals are egocentric while selecting behaviors that will help them avoid punishment and maximize self-interest (Kohlberg, 1969, 1976). By contrast, Gilligan (1982) proposed the ethics of care in response to methodological concerns

**29**

about Kohlberg's(1969; 1976) research. Kohlberg examined hypothetical dilemmas among male respondents instead of the real moral dilemmas they experienced. Gilligan examined women who experienced real moral dilemmas and revealed evidence of an alternative moral orientation characterized by authentic relationships that reflect concerns about understanding the subjective experience and requirements of others, and responding to them in a genuine manner. Unlike Kohlberg, Gilligan proposed that individuals who demonstrate a care orientation do not focus on adjudicating between competing rights. According to Gilligan, individuals with a care orientation focus on identifying creative methods of simultaneously fulfilling competitive responsibilities for others (Jaffee and Shibley-Hyde, 2000).

Moral orientation refers to the manner in which an individual handles dilemma decisions. This topic is not often discussed in the context of cognitive scientific development and practice. In addition, when the stimuli related to an individual's selfconcept differ (i.e., self-relevance), the individual's judgment about the orientation of justice and care also differ. Studies have demonstrated that individual factors (such as attitudes and motivations) and cultural values are two integral sources of influence (Cottone and Claus, 2000; Haidt and Joseph, 2004; Yang, 2004; Greene, 2013). For example, some studies have noted that cultural values (traditionality and modernity) provide a better reflection of individuals' performance and objectively interpret the internal motivation of their participation in social activities (Miller and Bersoff, 1992; Hong and Mallorie, 2004; Kagitcibasi, 2013; Shin et al., 2013). Traditionality (modernity) refers to a cluster of most common psychological characteristics, such as needs, attitudes, beliefs, values, temperaments and behaviors in traditional (modern) society. Therefore, when the degree of association between the target stimulus and an individual differs (i.e., self-relevance), the behavioral reactions of individuals with different cultural values may vary in justice and care moral orientation.

The modern society is presented as a multimodernity of the convergence of Eastern and Western cultures that entangles traditionality with modernity, because these basic forms of cultural values are the key psychological elements in modern society (Shin et al., 2013). Some studies have noted that examining the psychological influences of traditionality and modernity can provide a better explanation of individual behaviors and effectively interpret the internal source of our participation in modern social activities (Chan and Palley, 2005; Kagitcibasi, 2013; Frías et al., 2014). Researches have suggested that cultural values influence moral judgment. Kohlberg's theory of moral cognitive development and Gilligan's moral dualism propose that the principle of moral orientation is applicable in various social cultures (Kyte, 1996; Jaffee and Shibley-Hyde, 2000; Ellis and Shute, 2007; Tucker et al., 2014). Few scholars also believe that moral principles are culturally specific. For example, Shweder et al. (1987) noted that individuals acquired different core moral values of the society through cross-cultural studies. These moral values reflect the cultural significance of a particular group, and indicate that when they are confronted with a moral dilemma, they exhibit preference for a specific moral orientation. Miller and Bersoff (1992) examined the differences between Americans and Indians and found that Americans indicated a typical moral justice orientation, whereas Indians indicated a typical care orientation for an identical moral dilemma. Therefore, (Yang, 2004) noted that Chinese and Western culture have different origins in terms of moral principles. The fundamental difference is that both cultural systems have different assumptions about the relationship between the individual and society. Other studies have also obtained similar findings. For example, Roberts (2017) noted that both gender and cultural dilemmas play an integral role in the judgment of justice. Suh et al. (2008) used an icon paradigm to examine that the independent (Americans) vs. interdependent (Korea) self-construal process leads to different cultural behaviors. Furthermore, the results strongly suggested that differences in self-construal processes underlined crosscultural differences in life satisfaction judgments.

Recent studies have demonstrated that examining the cultural icon prime paradigm is an effective method for studying the dynamic interaction between culture and psychology. To examine how cultural values affect the corresponding psychological processes, most studies have used experiments with higher internal validity with regards to various elements, such as cultural symbols, representations, and norms. For instance, Friedman et al. (2012) used cultural priming paradigm to reveal that managers who have been abroad switch their cultural orientation as a result of being shown Western or Chinese cultural icons, and this effect occurs when "environmental" priming is used, and also confirmed that this effect is found when examining pay allocation decisions in addition to attribution patterns. In addition, Hu and Liu (2009) recently used a classic cultural icon prime paradigm to reveal that Chinese young people showed priority to the principles of justice and care in moral dilemmas under traditional and modern cultural values.

Observations regarding the behavioral interactions in terms of moral decisions, cultural values, and self-relevant processing have triggered researchers to consider a pertinent question: does the priming of psychological modernity or traditionality substantially influence self-relevant processing on moral orientation? One of the problems that arise is that most studies have taken an explicit rather than implicit approach. Few studies in this domain have reported on the implicit level. More importantly, some studies have indicated the discrepancy between findings based on the implicit and explicit levels (Deshon and Alexander, 1996; Asendorpf et al., 2002; Schnabel et al., 2010).

Research has indicated that the IAT is a flexible and relatively straightforward tool for assessing the strengths of associations between different concepts, thus contributing notably to its widespread use in research (Nosek et al., 2007). IAT scripts are based on a seven-block (seven-task) structure; if no opposite category is evident, single-attribute IATs (SA-IATs) are deemed superior to traditional bipolar-attribute IATs (Penke et al., 2006; Seval Gündemir et al., 2014). Therefore, our research employed an SA-IAT to derive the relevant results. Thus, we aimed to use cultural icon prime paradigm to uncover the influence of self-relevance and cultural values (psychological tradition and modernity) on implicit justice and care level. Previous studies suggested that effect of self-relevance of moral orientation exists both at the implicit and explicit level (Hu and Liu, 2009, November.; Bian and Yan, 2015). More importantly, the results on the implicit level were more stable (Schneider et al., 2015; Shi et al., 2015; Burnside et al., 2018).

Based on the aforementioned studies, we sought to clarify their relationship at the implicit level by examining the following hypotheses: (1) cultural values can predict the self-reference effect on moral justice or moral care; (2) participants in the traditional culture group exhibit more differential effects on different selfreferential stimuli (self, friend, or stranger) at the implicit justice level, whereas those in the modern culture group exhibit less differential effects at the implicit justice level; and (3) participants in the traditional culture group exhibit more differential effects on different self-referential stimuli (self, friend, or stranger) at the implicit care level, whereas those in the modern culture group exhibit less differential effects at the implicit care level.

#### METHODS

#### Overview of Procedure and Design

We collected data using two experiments with similar procedures. Therefore, the procedures and results of both experiments are reported together. We used moral justice as the trait category label for an SA-IAT in Experiment 1, whereas moral care was used as the trait category label for Experiment 2. These trait categories were represented using single-attributes (e.g., "fairness" and "concern"). We informed the participants that the experiments focused on personality traits. The experiments lasted for approximately 25 min, and we promised and delivered feedback to the participants about their results after they completed the tasks. The cultural value icons and order of combined tasks within IATs were counterbalanced among participants. We designed each experiment using a 3 (cultural value icon: traditionality vs. modernity vs. no culture) × 3 (self-referential stimulus: self vs. friend vs. stranger) mixed factorial design, with repeated measures on the first factor. The dependent variables were the response time of the implicit moral justice and moral care experiments.

#### Participants

A total of 126 (63 pairs of friends; 59 male participants; and 67 female participants; average age of 23.93 years; age 18–26 years) and 114 (57 pairs of friends; 54 male participants; and 60 female participants; average age of 21.56 years; age 17–26 years) healthy college students participated in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. The participants were right-handed, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and had no history of neurological or psychiatric disorders. After the experiments concluded, we paid the participants U50. The Ethics Committee of Hunan Normal University approved this study.

#### Materials

Based on the cultural icon paradigm, cultural icons were used as a stimulus (Hong et al., 2000; Hu and Liu, 2009). Similarly sized sheets of blank paper were used as the control stimulus TABLE 1 | Single-attribute IAT for justice: Task sequence (One example of justice SA-IAT).

(no culture cue; 470 pixels × 220 pixels; Hu, 2011). We asked 30 respondents to indicate their responses using a 9-point Likert scale (1 = not at all, 9 = to a great extent) to determine the extent to which cultural icons were represented.

The results indicated that the ratings of traditional cultural icons (8.23) was significantly higher than the sheets of similarly sized sheets of blank paper [1.21, t(29) = 25.34, p < 0.001], and the ratings of modern cultural icons (8.16) was significantly higher than that those for similarly sized sheets of blank paper [1.32, t(29) = −27.61, p < 0.001]. Therefore, we used 72 pictures (24 pictures of traditional culture, modern culture, and no culture) as the cultural cue stimuli for these Chinese participants. After reviewing recent studies (Chen et al., 2011; Fan et al., 2016), we presented self-relevant names with varying degrees of correlation as the target stimuli: (a) those with high correlations to selfmaterial, such as the participant's name; (b) those moderately correlated with self-material, such as the name of the participant's friend; and (c) those with low correlations to self-material, such as a stranger's name. We presented stimuli from each class of self-referential stimulus.

## Procedure

#### Trial Blocks

In both studies, Single-attribute IAT (SA-IAT) used a standard seven-block procedure (Greenwald et al., 1998; Nosek et al., 2007). Target concepts were the names of self, friend and stranger, but only justice/care served as the (unipolar) attribute. The testing and analysis procedures were the same as for the justice/care IAT. **Table 1** presents an example of justice SA-IAT task.