We aimed to differentiate the neural responses to cooperative and competitive contexts, which are the two of the most important social contexts in human society. Healthy male college students were asked to complete a Tetris-like task requiring mental rotation skills under individual, cooperative, and competitive contexts in an fMRI scanner. While the participants completed the task, pictures of others experiencing pain evoking emotional empathy randomly appeared to capture contextual effects on empathic neural responses. Behavioral results indicated that, in the presence of cooperation, participants solved the tasks more accurately and quickly than what they did when in the presence of competition. The fMRI results revealed activations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) related to executive functions and theory of mind when participants performed the task under both cooperative and competitive contexts, whereas no activation of such areas was observed in the individual context. Cooperation condition exhibited stronger neural responses in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dmPFC than competition condition. Competition condition, however, showed marginal neural responses in the cerebellum and anterior insular cortex (AIC). The two social contexts involved stronger empathic neural responses to other’s pain than the individual context, but no substantial differences between cooperation and competition were present. Regions of interest analyses revealed that individual’s trait empathy modulated the neural activity in the state empathy network, the AIC, and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) depending on the social context. These results suggest that cooperation improves task performance and activates neural responses associated with reward and mentalizing. Furthermore, the interaction between trait- and state-empathy was explored by correlation analyses between individual’s trait empathy score and changing empathic brain activations along with the exposure to the cooperative and competitive social contexts.

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This study aims to develop and validate a new scale in order to measure the performance of classical education, which has been emphasized in liberal arts education in recent years. To this end, the main factors to be measured in classical education were selected through a review of the previous literature, and preliminary items were developed to conduct a questionnaire survey for the validity of experts. From the results of the first expert survey, main factors and items were corrected and supplemented, and thus a second expert survey was conducted using this scale. As a result, a scale consisting of 3 competencies and 1 efficacy was developed. The three competencies consisted of reading comprehension (practical reading, critical reading), communication competencies (speaking, writing, listening), and creative competencies. And problem-solving efficacy consists of a questions that could measure whether related problems could be solved through actual classical education. A preliminary questionnaire consisting of 27 questions, and a preliminary survey was conducted on students taking general liberal arts courses at A University. A total of 293 students participated in this survey, and entire sample was randomly divided into tow groups to conduct an exploratory factor analysis(N =135) and a confirmatory factor analysis (N =158). As a result, 22 items were finally selected as new classical education performance measurement tools, and the reliability of these questions was confirmed and the validity was verified by conducting a correlation analysis. Through this study, significance and limitations of the study were discussed, and subsequent studies were suggested.

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