| Adolescence is a period when individuals are more likely to engage in high risk behaviors.Previous researchers pay more attention to the negative risk-taking behaviors of adolescents.In recent years,some researchers have proposed that risk-taking behaviors also have positive significance to one’s development.The dual system theory and the reward processing system of brain network has made a basic explanation for the high risk-taking behavior of teenagers from the perspective of brain structure and cognitive function.However,many studies show that teenagers are sensitive to social information,so that social factors could change teenagers’ risk-taking behavior.We still don’t know how prosocial factors regulate adolescents’ risk-taking behavior and the related neural processing.In this study,two experiments were conducted to explore how prosocial context,affect adolescents’ risk-taking behaviors.We compare the behaviors and feedback-related ERP of adolescent taking risks for themselves or the charity in gambling task.According to Kathy’(2017)definition of prosocial risk-taking,we have added the context of taking risks for charity into the classical gambling paradigm.According to this definition,prosocial risk-taking behaviors should meet these conditions:1)the purpose of behavior is to benefit others rather than oneself;2)The behavior requires adolescents to undertake some unknown risks.Based on this operational definition,the prosocial gambling context in this study is to let the Adolescents voluntarily choose whether to gamble for charity or not.If adolescents choose to take part in prosocial risk-taking,he will undertake the possible losses in this part of the task,and the income will be donated to the charity designated by themselves after the task is completed.In the first experiment,forty-five teenagers(twenty-eight women,mean age 16.07)participated in the probability gambling task which the participants could choose whether to gamble or not according to the given gain-loss probability.The behavioral results show that:1)In terms of risk rate,gambling for charity has a lower risk rate,especially in the trials with loss probability 45%,50%,54%.2)As for the reaction time,the participants’reaction time for charity is stable in all gain-loss probabilities;When gambling for themselves shows different performance that reaction time is lengthened under unfavorable conditions and reaction time is shortened under favorable conditions.The ERP finding shows that:1)Whether taking risks for oneself or for charity,obvious feedback-related negativity(FRN)are observed;2)Comparing the difference wave of FRN,it is found that FRN amplitude is larger in prosocial context.3)Comparing the ERP amplitude induced by gain and lose in the two task contexts,it is found that when gambling for charity,positive feedback induces larger positivity,negative feedback induces smaller negativity,and the larger FRN difference wave is mainly caused by positive feedback.These results show that the risk-taking behavior of teenagers significantly reduced when gambling for charity,and the reduction may be caused by the increased sensitivity to positive feedback and the decreased sensitivity to negative feedback.This indicates that prosocial contexts may reduce individuals’ loss aversion.Therefore,in the second experiment,we selected a gambling task that can quantify the risk-taking after losses to test this hypothesis.In experiment two,forty-one adolescents(twenty-three women,average age 16.07)participated in the simple gambling task.In this classic paradigm,researchers found a phenomenon that after negative feedback the risk rate generally increased,it is believed that this might be the "compensation" effect caused by loss aversion.So we used this task and added prosocial context.The behavioral results show that:1)consistent with experiment one,the rate of gambling for charity is lower;2)However,the key difference between gambling self and charity is that the obviously increased gambling rates after negative feedback when gambling for themselves do not appear in the context of charity gambling.This result suggests that the "compensatory" risk driven by loss aversion only appears when gambling for oneself.ERP results show:1)Whether taking risks for themselves or for charity,obvious FRN are observed;2)Comparing the difference wave of self-risk and prosocial risk,we found that there was no significant difference in FRN,but the late P300 component had greater amplitude in prosocial context.3)Comparing the ERP amplitude induced by gain and lose in the two task contexts,it is found that when gambling for charity,P300 have greater amplitude whether after positive feedback or negative feedback which suggests that P300 may be regarded as an effective indicator of prosocial risk-taking.P300 might reflect that prosocial behavior can be used as a social reward,causing activation of reward neural system.Overall,this study shows that when gambling for charity,teenagers’ risk-taking behavior significantly reduced,suggesting that prosocial factors can reduce the risk-taking behavior of teenagers in laboratory tasks.The mechanism of reduction might be that the prosocial factors can change teenager’ response to rewards and punishments,thus regulates the motivation system which involves cognition and emotion processing.When gambling for charity,participants reduced loss aversion to punishment and increased the sensitivity to reward.The results suggest us adding prosocial factors into activities may contribute to reduce the impulsive behavior of teenagers. |
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