Within this emotional context, participants were then asked to play a trust game, which involved decisions about how much money they wished to invest in a stranger (with the stranger having the possibility to repay in kind or keep all the invested money to themselves).Washington: Bad mood and negative emotions can make a person more distrustful, says a recent study. This relationship between brain activity and behaviour was nullified when participants felt anxious.
Negative effect suppresses the social cognitive neural machinery important for understanding and predicting others behaviour," explained authors Jan Engelmann and Christian Ruff.The team also recorded participants brain responses using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while they made trust decisions. To induce a prolonged state of negative affect, the team used the well-established threat-of-shock method, in which participants are threatened with (but only sometimes given) an unpleasant electrical shock.As part of the study, a team of researchers investigated whether the incidental aversive effect can influence the trust behaviour and the brain networks relevant for supporting social cognition.