Researchers are exploring whether these ubiquitous fluorinated molecules might worsen infections or hamper vaccine effectiveness.
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Edited by Michael S. Gazzaniga, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, and approved March 27, 2012 (received for review February 7, 2012)
Abstract
Humans devote 30–40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences. What drives this propensity for disclosure? Here, we test recent theories that individuals place high subjective value on opportunities to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others and that doing so engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward. Five studies provided support for this hypothesis. Self-disclosure was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area. Moreover, individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self. Two additional studies demonstrated that these effects stemmed from the independent value that individuals placed on self-referential thought and on simply sharing information with others. Together, these findings suggest that the human tendency to convey information about personal experience may arise from the intrinsic value associated with self-disclosure.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: dtamir{at}fas.harvard.edu.
Author contributions: D.I.T. and J.P.M. designed research, D.I.T. and J.P.M. performed research; D.I.T. analyzed data; and D.I.T. and J.P.M. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1202129109/-/DCSupplemental.
Intrinsic value of self-disclosure
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