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Forgive or complain: Interpersonal distance modulates reactive attitudes and neural responses toward wrongdoers
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  • Sijin Li,
  • Si Cheng,
  • Chenyu Shangguan,
  • Xianling Su,
  • Xu Li
Sijin Li
Shenzhen University
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Si Cheng
Shenzhen University
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Chenyu Shangguan
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications
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Xianling Su
Shanghai Normal University
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Xu Li
Shanghai Normal University

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Abstract

While the effect of interpersonal distance on forgiveness has been investigated over the past few years, it remains unclear whether this facilitating effect holds even when measured implicitly. Meanwhile, though cognitive control and the corresponding prefrontal cortex play a prominent role in forgiveness processing, the neural mechanism underlying forgiveness toward varied wrongdoers is largerly unexplored. Here, forty-two participants initially underwent noise offense either from their friend or stranger, followed by a word identification test to examine their reactive attitude, during which they were presented with word-name combinations and required to categorize forgive- or complain-label words while ignoring the names of their friends or strangers below. A shorter reaction time reflects more congruence with one’s implicit attitude. Electroencephalogram was recorded during the word identification test. Behaviorally, while individuals reacted faster to forgive-friend relative to complain-friend pairings, no such reaction bias was found for the stranger-wrongdoer, which suggests that individuals were more inclined to forgive someone close. Regarding the EEG/ERP results, forgive-friend elicited lower alpha oscillation and more negative frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) value than complain-friend combinations, suggesting increased and dominant activity in the right prefrontal network during forgiveness toward friends. Whereas complain- relative to forgive-stranger combinations elicited larger P3 amplitudes, suggesting a neural encoding bias to information associated with complaints about stranger-wrongdoer. These findings provide objective evidence for the benefits of closeness on forgiveness, which broaden previous findings depending on explicit measures into situations where forgiveness was measured implicitly and thus minimized confounding factors such as social desirability.