Serotonin Levels Determine Sense of Fairnes

People who have low serotonin are more apt to think that they were being given unfair treatment in an economic game.

By Ed Edelson
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, June 5 (HealthDay News) -- Levels of a brain chemical known as serotonin govern the way people react to unfair offers when they play the game of life, a new study indicates.

Serotonin, which carries messages between neurons, is involved in emotional control. One recent study found that the expression of anger in women was affected by variations in a gene governing the receptors for serotonin in brain cells.

The new study, reported in the June 5 issue of Science, had people play what is called the Ultimate Game, which is being used widely in psychological and neurological studies. The game has one player proposing a way to split a pot of money. If the offer is accepted by the other player, both get paid. If it is refused, neither gets a payment.

The researchers had some players make deliberately unfair offers: "I get 80 percent, you get 20 percent." They found that players given a chemical that lowered serotonin levels were more likely to reject an unfair offer.

Serotonin levels have that effect, because the chemical is involved in the activity of the prefrontal region of the brain, explained study author Molly J. Crockett, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge in England.

"One recent study on the Ultimate Game showed that when an unfair offer is accepted, you see activity in the prefrontal cortex," Crockett said. "Down-rating the emotional response makes it more unlikely that an unfair offer will be accepted."

In other words, lower serotonin levels also meant a higher level of resentment, so that an offer that wasn't as good as it might be would be turned down. Conversely, higher serotonin levels would make it easier to live in an imperfect world.

It's hard to apply that knowledge directly, Crockett said.

"What we did was have people fast overnight," she said. "On some days of the study, they took either a pill with all amino acids or a placebo. On the experiment day, they took a pill with all the amino acids but tryptophan. Over the course of several hours, that would have been converted to serotonin."

Knowledge about the role of serotonin in the emotions already is being put to use, sometimes legally and sometimes not, said research team member Matthew D. Lieberman, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Prescription medications such as antidepressants are known to affect serotonin levels, and the same is true of MDMA, the psychedelic drug whose street name is Ecstasy, Lieberman said. It is, he said, "a quick serotonin enhancer."

One everyday implication of the study is that brain chemistry "is going to affect how we judge other people and are treated by other people," Lieberman said.

A proposed experiment would have people play the Ultimate Game inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine that would produce images of brain activity, Lieberman said. "We could see, as we change serotonin levels, how the brain responds in an imaging study to fair and unfair offers," he said.

Phone Envy

I like to think that I'm above such trivial things but J.C. they got good phones!

Saw her last night

Golden Rule

CHRISTIANITY

"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets." - Matthew 7:12

JUDAISM

"What is harmful to you, do not to your fellow men. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary." - Talmud, Shabbat, 312

HINDUISM

"This is the turn of duty; do naught unto others which could cause you pain if done to you." - Mahabharata, 5, 1517

CONFUCIANISM

"Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto other that you would not have them do unto you." - Analects, 15, 23

TAOISM

"Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss." - T’sai Shang Kan Ying P’ien

BUDDHISM

"Hurt not others in ways you yourself would find hurtful." - Udana-Varga, 5, 18

ZOROASTRIANISM

"That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good for itself." - Didistan-i-dinik, 94, 5

ISLAM

"No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself." - Sunnah

SECULAR VIEW

"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." - George Bernard Shaw

May 2nd - No Pants Day

Books I want to read:

The City of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The Parenthood Decision
Cheerfully Childless
MisConceptions by Naomi Wolfe
Survivor: A Novel
The Batille Reader
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Kite Runner
The Way of All Flesh By Samuel Butler

The White Plague by Frank Herbert
Independence Day by Richard Ford
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bello
The Power and the Glory by Graham Green
The Most Of P.G. Wodehouse
The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science by Londa Schiebinger
Being There by Jerzy Kosinski
Beyond Stretching : Russian Flexibility Breakthroughs by Pavel Tsatsouline
The WInd-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Free Lecture

FRIDAY, APRIL 18, 7 P.M.
Anne Waldman discusses her life as a Beat poet with Harry Ransom Center Curator of British and American Literature Molly Schwartzburg. This free lecture occurs at the Harry Ransom Center.

Waldman co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she serves as the Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program. She has published dozens of books of poetry, and her work has been translated into several languages.

This program is presented in conjunction with the Ransom Center's current exhibition On the Road with the Beats.