Praise as good as cash to brain: study

By Julie SteenhuysenThu Apr 24, 9:17 AM ET

Paying people a compliment appears toactivate the same reward center in the brain as paying themcash, Japanese researchers said on Wednesday.

They said the study offers scientific support for thelong-held assumption that people get a psychological boost fromhaving a good reputation.

"We found that these seemingly different kinds of rewards-- a good reputation versus money -- are biologically coded bythe same neural structure, the striatum," said Dr. NorihiroSadato of the Japanese National Institute for PhysiologicalSciences in Okazaki, Japan.

"This provides the biological basis of our everydayexperience that personal reputation is felt as rewards," Sadatosaid in an e-mail.

Sadato's team studied 19 healthy people using a brainimaging technique known as functional magnetic resonanceimaging, or fMRI.

In one set of experiments, people played a gambling game inwhich they were told one of three cards would yield a payout.The researchers then monitored the brain activity triggeredwhen the subjects got a cash reward.

In a second set of experiments, people were told they werebeing evaluated by strangers based on information from apersonality questionnaire and a video they had made.

The researchers then monitored reactions to these stagedevaluations -- including when the subjects thought strangershad paid them a compliment.

'NEED TO BELONG'

Both kinds of rewards triggered activity in areward-related area of the brain. Sadato said the findingrepresents an important first step toward explaining complexhuman social behaviors such as altruism.

The fact that the social reward is biologically codedsuggests that "the need to belong ... is essential for humans,"said Sadato, whose study appears in the journal Neuron.

A similar study in the same journal by Caroline Zink of theNational Institute of Mental Health and colleagues found thesame brain region was active when people were processinginformation about social status.

They said the finding might have implications on how socialstanding affects behavior and health.

The researchers created an artificial social hierarchy inwhich 72 participants played an interactive computer game formoney.

Participants were assigned a social status they were toldwas based on their playing skill. Researchers monitored theirbrain activity as the participants were shown pictures ofinferior and superior players who were supposedly playing thegame in different rooms.

Zink and colleagues saw increased activity in the brain'sreward center when people won money or saw their socialstanding rise.

"The processing of hierarchical information seems to behard-wired ... underscoring how important it is for us," Zinksaid in a statement.

(Editing by Xavier Briand.)

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