Influence Of Social Status And Different Contexts On Social Mindfulness

“Social mindfulness” refers to being thoughtful of others and considering their needs when making decisions.Compared with other cooperative behaviors that need to sacrifice self interest,it is a relatively low-cost cooperative behavior.Previous studies found that social mindfulness could be influenced by many factors,such as sex,social value orientation,and so on.As far as we know,few studies are focusing on event-related potential(ERP)research and oxytocin research.In the present thesis,an ERP experiment and an oxytocin experiment were designed to explore the effect of social status(Exp1)and social context(Exp2)on social mindfulness.In Exp1,we compared the behavioral and neural responses triggered by observing others’ socially mindful/unmindful choices and how these responses were modulated by the social status of the agency.At the behavioral level,observing socially mindful choices made the observers(i.e.,the participants)feel better,rate the actors as more likable,and behave more cooperatively than did observing socially unmindful choices.Analysis of ERPs revealed that compared with socially unmindful choices,mindful choices elicited more negative feedback related negativity(FRN).Notably,this effect of social mindfulness was only significant when the actor’s social status was medium and high,it was undetectable when the actor’s social status was low.In Exp2,we investigated how oxytocin affects social mindfulness under social/non-social contexts.Results showed that(1)compared with non-social context,social context elicited higher So Mi index only under oxytocin condition.(2)The context effect of social mindfulness could be predicted by oxytocin and affective empathy trait.These results demonstrate that(1)the social mindfulness of others can be rapidly detected and processed,as reflected by FRN,even though it does not seem to receive further,more elaborate evaluation,as reflected by P3.(2)Low-cost cooperative behaviors such as social mindfulness can be detected and appreciated by our brain,which may result in better mood and more cooperative behaviors in the perceivers.(3)The perception of social mindfulness is sensitive to important social information,such as social status.(4)using intranasal oxytocin could enhance the difference of social mindfulness under social context and non-social context.(5)Oxytocin and empathy play an important role in social context/non-social context of social mindfulness.To the best of our knowledge,this study offers the very first psychophysical evidence of the social status and social context on social mindfulness.