Giving support rewards the giver and the receiver
By Liz Lockhart
Many people with mental health disorders rely on the support of others to get them through. Many who 
have overcome mental health difficulties turn their experiences into something positive by giving back to others in need. Scientists have now discovered that giving support offers health benefits to the giver as well as the receiver.
The study was conducted by scientists at the UCLA and is published in the online edition of Psychosomatic Medicine.
‘When people talk about the ways in which social support is good for our health, they typically assume that the benefits of social support come from the support we receive from others, but it now seems likely that some of the health benefits of social support come from the support we provide to others,’ said Naomi Eisenberger, the senior author of the study and a UCLA assistant professor of psychology.
At UCLA’s Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Centre, Eisenberger and Tristen Inagaki, a UCLA psychology graduate student, studied twenty young heterosexual couples who were all in good relationships.
The twenty women in the couples underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans. Simultaneously their boyfriends, who were just outside the scanners, received painful electric shocks. Some of the time the women were allowed to provide support by holding the arm of their boyfriends but at other times they had to watch their boyfriends receive the shocks without providing support. At the times that support could not be given the women held a squeeze-ball. At other times the boyfriends did not receive a shock and the women were allowed to either touch or not touch them.
The researchers found that when the boyfriends were in pain, the women who were able to give support showed increased activity in reward-related areas of the brain, including the ventral striatum and septal area. They also found that the more reward-related neural activity these women displayed, the more connected they reported feeling with their boyfriends while providing support. Decreased activity was shown under the conditions in which no support was provided.
‘One of these regions, the ventral striatum, is typically active in response to simple rewards like chocolate, sex and money,’ Eisenberger said. ‘The fact that support-giving lso activates this region suggests that support-giving may be processed by the brain as a very basic type of rewarding experience.’
The septal area also provided the researchers with an interesting pattern of neural activity. As well as being a pleasure, the septal area plays a role in threat or stress-reduction by inhibiting other regions of the brain that process threats. One of these other areas is the amygdala. It was found that the women who had a greater activity in the septal area also had less activity in the amygdale.
Eisenberger said ‘This finding suggests that support-giving may have stress-reducing effects for the person who provides the support. Activity in the septal area during support-giving was negatively correlated with activity in the amygdale which is a region known to play a role in fear and stress responses. If there is something about support-giving that leads to reductions in amygdale activity, this suggests that suggests that support-giving itself may have stress-reducing properties.’
Inagaki said ‘Giving to others has benefits. We even saw substantially more activity in these reward brain regions when the women were giving support than when they were touching their boyfriends when he was not getting shocked. You might think it would be more pleasurable to touch your boyfriend when he was not getting shocked. You might think it would be more pleasurable to touch your boyfriend when he is not going through something painful, but we found the opposite, which was surprising.’
The benefits of providing support also apply when a loved one is experiencing other stressful events, including emotionally painful events, Eisenberger thinks. She explained that ‘Giving support to those we are close to, such as family members or children, may increase their likelihood of survival and, therefore, the likelihood that our genes will get passed on. Because of the importance of support-giving for the survival of our species, it is possible that over the course of our evolutionary history, support-giving may have become psychologically rewarding to ensure that this behaviour persisted.’
Further research is being conducted by Eisenberger and Inagaki into how giving to others may reduce stress responses and how this can contribute to better health.
