Diminishing reciprocal fairness by disrupting the right prefrontal cortex

Humans restrain self-interest with moral and social values. They are the only species known to exhibit reciprocal fairness, which implies the punishment of other individuals' unfair behaviors, even if it hurts the punisher's economic self-interest. Reciprocal fairness has been demonstrated in the Ultimatum Game, where players often reject their bargaining partner's unfair offers. Despite progress in recent years, however, little is known about how the human brain limits the impact of selfish motives and implements fair behavior. Here we show that disruption of the right, but not the left, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) by low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation substantially reduces subjects' willingness to reject their partners' intentionally unfair offers, which suggests that subjects are less able to resist the economic temptation to accept these offers. Importantly, however, subjects still judge such offers as very unfair, which indicates that the right DLPFC plays a key role in the implementation of fairness-related behaviors.     

Serotonin modulates behavioral reactions to unfairness

Serotonin (5-HT) has long been implicated in social behavior and impulsivity, but the mechanisms through which it modulates self-control remain unclear. We observed the effects of manipulating 5-HT function on behavior in the ultimatum game, where players must decide whether to accept or reject fair or unfair monetary offers from another player. Participants with depleted 5-HT levels rejected a greater proportion of unfair offers, but not fair offers, without showing changes in mood, fairness judgment, basic reward processing, or response inhibition. Our results suggest that 5-HT plays a critical role in regulating emotion during social decision-making.     

The rupture and repair of cooperation in borderline personality disorder

To sustain or repair cooperation during a social exchange, adaptive creatures must understand social gestures and the consequences when shared expectations about fair exchange are violated by accident or intent. We recruited 55 individuals afflicted with borderline personality disorder (BPD) to play a multiround economic exchange game with healthy partners. Behaviorally, individuals with BPD showed a profound incapacity to maintain cooperation, and were impaired in their ability to repair broken cooperation on the basis of a quantitative measure of coaxing. Neurally, activity in the anterior insula, a region known to respond to norm violations across affective, interoceptive, economic, and social dimensions, strongly differentiated healthy participants from individuals with BPD. Healthy subjects showed a strong linear relation between anterior insula response and both magnitude of monetary offer received from their partner (input) and the amount of money repaid to their partner (output). In stark contrast, activity in the anterior insula of BPD participants was related only to the magnitude of repayment sent back to their partner (output), not to the magnitude of offers received (input). These neural and behavioral data suggest that norms used in perception of social gestures are pathologically perturbed or missing altogether among individuals with BPD. This game-theoretic approach to psychopathology may open doors to new ways of characterizing and studying a range of mental illnesses.     

Empathy for pain involves the affective but not sensory components of pain

Our ability to have an experience of another's pain is characteristic of empathy. Using functional imaging, we assessed brain activity while volunteers experienced a painful stimulus and compared it to that elicited when they observed a signal indicating that their loved one--present in the same room--was receiving a similar pain stimulus. Bilateral anterior insula (AI), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brainstem, and cerebellum were activated when subjects received pain and also by a signal that a loved one experienced pain. AI and ACC activation correlated with individual empathy scores. Activity in the posterior insula/secondary somatosensory cortex, the sensorimotor cortex (SI/MI), and the caudal ACC was specific to receiving pain. Thus, a neural response in AI and rostral ACC, activated in common for "self" and "other" conditions, suggests that the neural substrate for empathic experience does not involve the entire "pain matrix." We conclude that only that part of the pain network associated with its affective qualities, but not its sensory qualities, mediates empathy.     

Placebo-induced changes in FMRI in the anticipation and experience of pain

The experience of pain arises from both physiological and psychological factors, including one's beliefs and expectations. Thus, placebo treatments that have no intrinsic pharmacological effects may produce analgesia by altering expectations. However, controversy exists regarding whether placebos alter sensory pain transmission, pain affect, or simply produce compliance with the suggestions of investigators. In two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, we found that placebo analgesia was related to decreased brain activity in pain-sensitive brain regions, including the thalamus, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex, and was associated with increased activity during anticipation of pain in the prefrontal cortex, providing evidence that placebos alter the experience of pain.     

Damage to the insula disrupts addiction to cigarette smoking

A number of brain systems have been implicated in addictive behavior, but none have yet been shown to be necessary for maintaining the addiction to cigarette smoking. We found that smokers with brain damage involving the insula, a region implicated in conscious urges, were more likely than smokers with brain damage not involving the insula to undergo a disruption of smoking addiction, characterized by the ability to quit smoking easily, immediately, without relapse, and without persistence of the urge to smoke. This result suggests that the insula is a critical neural substrate in the addiction to smoking.     

Chimpanzees are rational maximizers in an ultimatum game

Traditional models of economic decision-making assume that people are self-interested rational maximizers. Empirical research has demonstrated, however, that people will take into account the interests of others and are sensitive to norms of cooperation and fairness. In one of the most robust tests of this finding, the ultimatum game, individuals will reject a proposed division of a monetary windfall, at a cost to themselves, if they perceive it as unfair. Here we show that in an ultimatum game, humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are rational maximizers and are not sensitive to fairness. These results support the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences and aversion to inequitable outcomes, which play key roles in human social organization, distinguish us from our closest living relatives.     

Neural mechanisms of foraging

Behavioral economic studies involving limited numbers of choices have provided key insights into neural decision-making mechanisms. By contrast, animals' foraging choices arise in the context of sequences of encounters with prey or food. On each encounter, the animal chooses whether to engage or, if the environment is sufficiently rich, to search elsewhere. The cost of foraging is also critical. We demonstrate that humans can alternate between two modes of choice, comparative decision-making and foraging, depending on distinct neural mechanisms in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) using distinct reference frames; in ACC, choice variables are represented in invariant reference to foraging or searching for alternatives. Whereas vmPFC encodes values of specific well-defined options, ACC encodes the average value of the foraging environment and cost of foraging.     

The medial frontal cortex and the rapid processing of monetary gains and losses

We report the observation of neural processing that occurs within 265 milliseconds after outcome stimuli that inform human participants about gains and losses in a gambling task. A negative-polarity event-related brain potential, probably generated by a medial-frontal region in or near the anterior cingulate cortex, was greater in amplitude when a participant's choice between two alternatives resulted in a loss than when it resulted in a gain. The sensitivity to losses was not simply a reflection of detecting an error; gains did not elicit the medial-frontal activity when the alternative choice would have yielded a greater gain, and losses elicited the activity even when the alternative choice would have yielded a greater loss. Choices made after losses were riskier and were associated with greater loss-related activity than choices made after gains. It follows that medial-frontal computations may contribute to mental states that participate in higher level decisions, including economic choices.     

公平:解决城乡差距的突破点

分析了城乡不公平待遇的表现、原因,提出解决问题的建议。     

反不正当竞争法律制度的完善

近年来,我国市场经济得到了迅速发展,市场体系日趋完备,市场竞争日益激烈,一些新的不正当竞争行为逐渐暴露出来,有的表现还很突出。相比之下《反不正当竞争法》规范的不正当竞争行为、执法手段、法律责任等与现实经济生活存在着明显的不适应。目前,我国反不正当竞争法律制度的缺陷主要包括：缺失一般条款规定、不正当竞争行为涵盖不全、法律条款的操作难度大、执行条款缺乏强制性、执法主体规定缺乏唯一性等。应从以下几个方面解决：增加对新的不正当竞争行为的界定、加强《反不正当竞争法》的可操作性、强化反不正当竞争的执法手段、划清反不正当竞争的执法权限、加大处罚力度,增加惩罚性处罚条款。     

Local is not fair: indigenous peasant farmer preference for export markets

The food sovereignty movement calls for a reversal of the neoliberal globalization of food, toward an alternative development model that supports peasant production for local consumption. The movement holds an ambiguous stance on peasant production for export markets, and clearly prioritizes localized trade. Food sovereignty discourse often simplifies and romanticizes the peasantry—overlooking agrarian class categories and ignoring the interests of export-oriented peasants. Drawing on 8 months of participant observation in the Andean countryside and 85 interviews with indigenous peasant farmers, this paper finds that export markets are viewed as more fair than local markets. The indigenous peasants in this study prefer export trade because it offers a more stable and viable livelihood. Feeding the national population through local market intermediaries, by contrast, is perceived as unfair because of oversupply and low, fluctuating prices. This perspective, from the ground, offers important insight to movement actors and scholars who risk oversimplifying peasant values, interests, and actions.     

The neural basis of intuitive best next-move generation in board game experts

The superior capability of cognitive experts largely depends on quick automatic processes. To reveal their neural bases, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity of professional and amateur players in a board game named shogi. We found two activations specific to professionals: one in the precuneus of the parietal lobe during perception of board patterns, and the other in the caudate nucleus of the basal ganglia during quick generation of the best next move. Activities at these two sites covaried in relevant tasks. These results suggest that the precuneus-caudate circuit implements the automatic, yet complicated, processes of board-pattern perception and next-move generation in board game experts.     

Social comparison affects reward-related brain activity in the human ventral striatum

Whether social comparison affects individual well-being is of central importance for understanding behavior in any social environment. Traditional economic theories focus on the role of absolute rewards, whereas behavioral evidence suggests that social comparisons influence well-being and decisions. We investigated the impact of social comparisons on reward-related brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). While being scanned in two adjacent MRI scanners, pairs of subjects had to simultaneously perform a simple estimation task that entailed monetary rewards for correct answers. We show that a variation in the comparison subject's payment affects blood oxygenation level-dependent responses in the ventral striatum. Our results provide neurophysiological evidence for the importance of social comparison on reward processing in the human brain.     

Spatiotemporal rescue of memory dysfunction in Drosophila

We have developed a method for temporal and regional gene expression targeting (TARGET) in Drosophila and show the simultaneous spatial and temporal rescue of a memory defect. The transient expression of the rutabaga-encoded adenylyl cyclase in the mushroom bodies of the adult brain was necessary and sufficient to rescue the rutabaga memory deficit, which rules out a developmental brain defect in the etiology of this deficit and demonstrates an acute role for rutabaga in memory formation in these neurons. The TARGET system offers general utility in simultaneously addressing issues of when and where gene products are required.     

Evolution of a vertebrate social decision-making network

Animals evaluate and respond to their social environment with adaptive decisions. Revealing the neural mechanisms of such decisions is a major goal in biology. We analyzed expression profiles for 10 neurochemical genes across 12 brain regions important for decision-making in 88 species representing five vertebrate lineages. We found that behaviorally relevant brain regions are remarkably conserved over 450 million years of evolution. We also find evidence that different brain regions have experienced different selection pressures, because spatial distribution of neuroendocrine ligands are more flexible than their receptors across vertebrates. Our analysis suggests that the diversity of social behavior in vertebrates can be explained, in part, by variations on a theme of conserved neural and gene expression networks.     

包容性增长视角下的乡村旅游发展路径研究

从包容性增长视角审视我国乡村旅游经济的发展,发现乡村旅游目的地“飞地化”普遍存在,而乡村旅游中经营和利益分配的飞地化导致的收入分配不公正是近几年乡村旅游目的地上访、冲突、拦阻游客现象频发的根源所在.最后,提出了我国乡村旅游经济包容性增长路径.     

贯休、齐己与石霜庆诸——禅宗灯史上的一桩公案

研究市场需求和生产成本同时扰动时非线性需求供应链的最优应对策略.首先在稳定条件下提出供应链的收益共享协调合约；生产成本和需求扰动会导致原有的收益共享合约不再协调，提出了供应链在一体化决策时应对双因素同时发生扰动的最优策略；进一步提出了改进的收益共享合约协调分散化决策的供应链系统.最后运用数值实验对模型进行了验证.     

当前农村基础设施建设的问题及其对策

当前我国农村基础设施在发展中存在资金投入不足、布局不合理等问题。而国家长期以来实行非均衡的、城乡二元结构的基础设施供给制度、自上而下的农村基础设施决策机制,以及单一供给的主体和资金渠道、政策性银行职能缺位是导致这些问题出现的主要原因。要促进农村基础设施的发展,就要建立均衡的、城乡一体化的基础设施供给制度,建立自下而上的农村基础设施决策机制,实现农村基础设施供给主体和资金渠道的多元化,明确和重新界定政策性银行的职能。     

农村教育欠公平的表现 原因及对策

教育公平是社会公平的基础。城乡二元结构和经济发展的不平衡性是农村教育欠公平的主要原因。国家应加大对农村教育资源的投资与优化配置力度,实行投资和政策倾斜。