A new study led by ESDLab Principal Investigator Luis-Sebastián Contreras-Huerta explores how neural responses when avoiding harm to others relate to the later willingness to exert effort for their benefit.

A new study led by Luis-Sebastián Contreras-Huerta, Principal Investigator at the Emotion and Social Decisions Lab (ESDLab), has been published in Cortex. The research examines an important question in social neuroscience: are the processes that make us reluctant to harm others related to our willingness to actively work for their benefit?

The study, “Neural signatures of harm aversion predict later willingness to exert effort for others’ rewards,” includes Felipe Rojas-Thomas, Principal Investigator at ESDLab, as a co-author, alongside an international team of researchers.

From avoiding harm to helping others

The researchers studied 66 participants across two social decision-making tasks conducted one week apart. In the first, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while making decisions involving a trade-off between earning money and delivering painful electric shocks to another person. One week later, they completed a second task measuring their willingness to exert physical effort to obtain rewards for someone else.

The results showed that individuals with greater harm aversion were also more willing to exert effort to benefit others. Importantly, neural responses measured during decisions about harming another person were associated with prosocial motivation one week later.

In particular, responses in the anterior insula to others’ harm predicted greater sensitivity to rewards for others, while activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) related to profiting from others’ harm showed a distinct association with later prosocial decisions.

Together, these findings provide new evidence that different forms of prosocial behavior—avoiding harm and actively investing effort to benefit others—are related at both behavioral and neural levels.

The study contributes to a broader line of research at ESDLab aimed at understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying prosocial motivation, empathy, and social decision-making.

We congratulate Luis-Sebastián Contreras-Huerta, Felipe Rojas-Thomas, and the entire research team on this new publication!

Learn more

Contreras-Huerta, L. S., Yu, H., Prosser, A. M. B., Lockwood, P. L., Rojas-Thomas, F., Crockett, M. J., & Apps, M. A. J. (2026). Neural signatures of harm aversion predict later willingness to exert effort for others’ rewards. Cortex, 205, 192–211. Read here