Though the idea of a “fairer” life appeals to everyone, the parameters of fairness vary greatly from person to person. Some of the most significant differences emerge when exploring aspects such as wealth redistribution and economic equity, and a striking study published in Nature Human Behaviour indicates that someone with a “prosocial” mindset has higher probabilities of getting depressed, feeling that way in both situations—if they receive less money, or if they receive more.
Politicians and economists around the world toss dozens of recipes into the air trying to make things 'fairer', but very few stop to think about the consequences for the individual. The inability to access certain basic resources has a huge impact, but what we want to know is what happens in each person's mind.
The Science Behind Fairness
In 2010, Dr. Masahiko Haruno discovered that when facing greater exposure to economic inequality, people considered “prosocial” show deep activation of the amygdala, the brain region associated with stress. In other words, a prosocial person gets depressed when they receive less money than others, but if they receive a larger amount, they feel guilty.
Approximately 60 percent of people are prosocial, while 30 percent are individualists (those who seek to optimize their resources), and the remaining 10 percent fall into the competitive category, focused only on having more than others. Haruno's latest study (developed with researchers Toshiko Tanaka and Takao Yamamoto) explores the relationship between this brain activity and long-term symptoms of depression.
When comparing images obtained via magnetic resonance imaging, they not only confirmed that prosocial individuals show a marked increase in amygdala activity when facing an unfair redistribution of wealth, but also that individualists have a similar reaction only when they are the victims of that injustice.
Link to Depression
To determine whether these brain activity patterns are linked to depression, Haruno and the team used the well-known Beck Depression Inventory, a questionnaire based on 21 multiple-choice items. The inventory measures symptoms of clinical depression within the last two weeks, and their conclusion was that prosocial brain patterns suffer more cases of depression, something that also happened a year later after follow-up with study participants.
Of course, this is not the end of the story. There are other brain regions associated with depression (the study also suggests hippocampal involvement), but psychotherapy can be of great help in these cases.
