2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
Thinking about death increases temporal discounting: A perspective from cognitive neuroscience
| Project/Area Number |
26780342
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Research Field |
Social psychology
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| Research Institution | Kyoto University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2014-04-01 – 2016-03-31
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| Keywords | 将来の死 / 未来思考 / 時間割引 / 報酬価値の修飾過程 / fMRI |
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
Humans can imagine possible future events. They can also recognize that their life is not endless. In this project, I examined how thinking about own death affects future-oriented monetary decisions by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During intertemporal choice, participants devalued a future reward to account for its delayed arrival when they engaged in thinking about death. This tendency was stronger in participants who tended to associate a death-related event with monetary decisions. These participants also exhibited enhanced activities in the amygdala and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex during the choice of larger delayed rewards when they imagined death. These results suggest that thinking about death makes people less willing to wait for future reward, possibly due to the emotional conflict that arises between the selecting the future reward and the awareness of the inevitability of death.
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| Free Research Field |
社会心理学
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