Does losing money truly hurt? The shared neural bases of monetary loss and pain

Does losing money truly hurt? The shared neural bases of monetary loss and pain. Huixin Tan,Qin Duan,Yihan Liu,Xinyu Qiao,Siyang Luo. Human Brain Mapping, March 22 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25840

Abstract: Both monetary loss and pain have been studied for decades, but evidence supporting the relationship between them is still lacking. We conducted a meta-analysis to explore the overlapping brain regions between monetary loss and pain, including physical pain and social pain. Regardless of the type of pain experienced, activation of the anterior insula was a shared neural representation of monetary loss and pain. The network representation pattern of monetary loss was more similar to that of social pain than that of physical pain. In conclusion, our research provided evidence of the common neural correlates of monetary loss and pain.

4 DISCUSSION

Current research has shown that monetary loss shares common neural bases with pain. We found that monetary loss and pain, whether physical pain or social pain, engaged overlapping neural regions. Although monetary loss and physical pain coactivated the right AI and dorsal anterior cingulate, monetary loss and social pain coactivated the left AI, inferior occipital gyrus, and lingual gyrus. Furthermore, the neural representation of monetary loss was more similar to social pain than to physical pain. All these results provided persuasive evidence of common neural correlates of monetary loss and pain.

Regardless of the type of pain experienced, activation of the AI was a shared neural representation of monetary loss and pain. The AI is a multifunctional brain region that is involved in various cognitive, perceptual, and socio-affective processes (Clos, Rottschy, Laird, Fox, & Eickhoff, 2014; Kurth, Zilles, Fox, Laird, & Eickhoff, 2010). In particular, activation of the insula plays an important role in affective processing (Koelsch, Cheung, Jentschke, & Haynes, 2021). Therefore, coactivation of the AI might reflect that monetary loss and pain engaged an overlapping neural module of affective processing. Moreover, monetary loss and physical pain coactivated the right AI, whereas monetary loss and social pain coactivated the left AI. This result was consistent with previous findings that the AI was right-lateralized in connectivity with the postcentral gyrus and superior parietal lobule, which were part of the physical pain network (Kann, Zhang, Manza, Leung, & Li, 2016), whereas the left AI was part of memory and socioemotional networks (Clos et al., 2014), and the activation of the left AI was associated with maintaining the feelings of others in working memory (Smith et al., 2017).

The comparison of activation patterns used three algorithms and consistently showed that the monetary loss network was more similar to the social pain network than to the physical pain network. For individuals, money is not only a physical stimulus but also has rich emotional and social meanings to people, since money can arouse positive or negative emotions (Tang, 1992; Yu, Huang, Mao, & Luo, 2022), elicit individuals’ internal motivation (Lea & Webley, 2006), reduce the harm caused by low self-esteem (Zhang, 2009) and change the norms of interpersonal relationships (Vohs et al., 2008; Zaleskiewicz & Gasiorowska, 2016). Moreover, this result provided neural evidence of the social resource theory of money, in which money was regarded as a type of social resource, similar to social relationships, which might elicit pain and a sense of security (Zhou et al., 2009; Zhou & Gao, 2008).

We admitted that our research had several limitations. For one thing, results of similar analyses may be due to higher similarities in sensory system between monetary loss and social pain compared to physical pain. The reason was that the sensory system of physical pain was the somatomotor system while the sensory system of both monetary loss and social pain was the visual system. However, we excluded this possibility by replicating the similarity analyses without including the somatomotor and visual networks. We got similar results to the previous ones (Figures S3 and S4), suggesting that the neural representation of monetary loss shared more similarities with that of social pain beyond the level of sensory system. For another thing, our research investigated the shared neural bases underlying monetary loss and pain by exploring whether processing these two events involved overlapping neural regions while ignoring the possibility of the involvement of overlapping functional connectivities. Previous studies have reported that the processing of social stimuli and monetary stimuli recruits overlapping functional connectivities by investigating the relationship between social reward and monetary reward (Gu et al., 2019). However, we remained unclear whether the processing of monetary loss and social pain also involved overlapping functional connectivities. Future studies could use meta-analytic connectivity modeling to investigate the neural correlates of monetary loss and social pain from the perspective of functional connectivity.