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Charitable fundraising increasingly relies on online crowdfunding platforms. Project images of charitable crowdfunding use emotional appeals to promote helping behavior. Negative emotions are commonly used to motivate helping behavior because the image of a happy child may not motivate donors to donate as willingly. However, some research has found that happy images can be more beneficial. These contradictory results suggest that the emotional valence of project imagery and how fundraisers frame project images effectively remain debatable. Thus, we compared and analyzed brain activation differences in the prefrontal cortex governing human emotions depending on donation decisions using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a neuroimaging device. We advance existing theory on charitable behavior by demonstrating that little correlation exists in donation intentions and brain activity between negative and positive project images, which is consistent with survey results on donation intentions by victim image. We also discovered quantitative brain hemodynamic signal variations between donors and nondonors, which can predict and detect donor mental brain functioning using functional connectivity, that is, the statistical dependence between the time series of electrophysiological activity and oxygenated hemodynamic levels in the prefrontal cortex. These findings are critical in developing future marketing strategies for online charitable crowdfunding platforms, especially project images.

公益筹款愈发依赖线上众筹平台。公益众筹的项目图片通过情感诉求激发助人行为。负面情绪常被用于唤起助人行为，因快乐孩童的形象往往难以让捐赠者心甘情愿地施以援手。但也有研究表明，积极主题的图片反而更能产生正向效果。上述相互矛盾的研究结果提示，项目影像的情绪效价（emotional valence）以及筹款方如何有效设计项目图片，目前仍存在广泛争议。为此，本研究借助功能性近红外光谱技术（functional near-infrared spectroscopy）——一种神经影像装置，对比分析了负责人类情绪调控的前额叶皮层的脑激活差异，该差异与捐赠决策直接相关。本研究证实，积极与消极项目图片对应的捐赠意愿与脑活动之间几乎不存在相关性，这与基于受害者形象图片的捐赠意愿调研结果一致，从而拓展了现有公益行为相关理论。此外，本研究还发现捐赠者与非捐赠者之间存在可量化的脑血流信号差异，且可通过功能连接（functional connectivity）——即前额叶皮层电生理活动时间序列与含氧血流水平之间的统计相关性——预测并识别捐赠者的脑神经功能状态。上述研究结果对于未来线上公益众筹平台的营销策略制定，尤其是项目图片的设计优化，具有重要的指导意义。