New Article: Altruism under Stress

A new article has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience by Stefan Schulreich, Anita Tusche, Philipp Kanske and Lars Schwabe. The authors examined the neural correlates of charitable giving during stressful situations. The ability to infer other people’s mental states (i.e. mentalising) has previously been shown to predict charitable giving. However, mentalising can be impaired by stress. The novel findings suggest that cortisol in particular can affect mentalising during altruistic decision-making. Furthermore, this effect of cortisol was enhanced particularly for more effective mentalisers.

You can read the full article here.