Fourth-year psychology student Tatiana Vardanyan experienced the powerful effects that go along with the perception of being treated unfairly when she transferred to UCLA two years ago, an emotion that social cognitive researchers can now explain scientifically.
Vardanyan said she encountered unfair treatment from students and professors who she felt looked down on her for her status as a transfer student.
“It made me feel like I shouldn’t even have any pride … it made me a little insecure,” Vardanyan said. “It does unconsciously affect you, whether you succumb to it or you reject it.”
UCLA researchers are uncovering the basis of why the perception of unfair treatment produces such powerful responses as described by Vardanyan with the use of neuro-imaging tools to decode the mysteries of human emotion.
In a study published by Golnaz Tabibnia, a postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, and Matthew Lieberman, an associate professor of psychology, key reward circuits in the brain were activated when subjects were treated fairly. Conversely, when subjects felt they had been insulted, regions of the brain associated with disgust were triggered.
Tabibnia said her study looked specifically at whether fairness produced any emotion at all, a subject rarely given scientific attention.
“(The prevailing thought was that) fairness is a neutral state and unfairness creates a negative state,” she said. “When you’re treated fairly, instead of it being a lack of negative emotion, there is a presence of positive emotion.”
The most current experimental findings on the brain’s reaction to fair treatment show that people with low serotonin levels were found to be more sensitive to being treated unfairly.
The experiments involved a subject responding to differing offers of how to split an amount of money from a proposer, Lieberman said. The offers could either be fair ““ $5 out of a total $10 ““ or unfair ““ $5 out of $23.
Throughout the process, subjects’ brain waves were monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology, which can uncover which specific parts of the brain are tied to certain emotional states.
Key brain regions that were activated when subjects received fair offers included the ventral striatum and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, two significant reward circuits in the brain, Tabibnia said.
“(These regions) respond to all kinds of rewarding stimuli. They respond to food in rats,” Tabibnia said. “When people see a beautiful face, this same region of the brain gets activated.”
When subjects accepted what they perceived as unfair offers, the right prefrontal cortex, which is associated with emotion regulation, was activated and the insula, which doles out disgust reactions, was suppressed.
“Being insulted produces a feeling that’s kind of like disgust,” Lieberman said. “It looked like people were regulating their sense of insult in the brain.”
Tabibnia noted that the study validates the notion that humans are not satisfied with merely material possessions ““ social relationships provide just as great a reward.
“Money and other motivating rewards is not all that rewards people,” she said. “If people are treated well by other humans, it makes them feel good. Social communication satisfies a basic human need: the need to belong, be accepted.”
Brain scanning technology could lead to further understanding of the connection between such experiences as receiving fair treatment and earning a sum of money which may seem different but have much in common, other researchers said.
“The (group’s) findings tell us that processes like fairness and rewarding feelings are actually relying on the same neurostructure,” said Naomi Eisenberger, an assistant professor of psychology. “That tells us something new and interesting about fairness.”
Eisenberger added that this field of research legitimizes more abstract human experiences such as feeling fair treatment.
“We all have this sense that it feels good to be treated fairly. To know that this is a real thing, (that) part of the reason it feels good to be treated fairly is (because of) our brain processes, helps validate that,” she said. “It validates peoples’ feelings that it feels good to be treated fairly.”
With feelings and emotions gaining scientific validity, we can gain a closer understanding of human behavior, Vardanyan said.
“If more people were to comprehend that, the world would be a much happier place,” Vardanyan said.