Pleasurable experiences — whether eating a turkey dinner, drinking a cocktail, riding a roller coaster, or watching a movie — all evoke neural activity in a circuit found in the medial forebrain that is rich in the neurotransmitter dopamine.

For some, providing assistance to others brings about a feeling of happiness, thus stimulating their brain’s pleasure centers. Others get a sense of satisfaction from charitable giving because it enhances their social status. And for some people, both motivations may apply.

Dr. William Harbaugh, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon performed a study designed to reveal what happens in the brain’s pleasure center when volunteers are charitable. In Dr. Harbaugh’s experiment, 19 women performed different economic transactions while their neural activity was monitored. The subjects were instructed that no one would know their decisions during the experiment, which removed the motivation of social status as a neural enhancement.

Each volunteer received money in an account at the outset of the study. They were given opportunities to donate the money or at times they were taxed without a choice. Some were even given more money with no conditions attached.

Brain scan results indicated that taxation and charitable giving activated nearly overlapping regions of the brain’s pleasure circuit, but charitable giving resulted in a stronger activation than taxation. Approximately half of the subjects demonstrated greater pleasure center activation from receiving money than from giving it, while the other half showed the opposite effect. Those who received more pleasure from giving were more likely to donate money during the experiment.

The bottom line is that for some people, charitable giving can be a reward in itself.