Forgive or complain:
Interpersonal distance modulates reactive attitudes and neural responses
toward wrongdoers
Sijin Li1,#, Si Cheng1,#, Chenyu
Shangguan2, Xianling Su3, Xu
Li3,*
1 School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China
2 College of Education Science and Technology, Nanjing University of
Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, China
3 College of Education, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200234,
China
Running head: the role of interpersonal distance in forgiveness
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest in relation
to the subject of this study.
# The two authors contributed equally to the study.
* Corresponding author. E-mail: lxuthus@shnu.edu.cn
Number of pages: 30
Number of figures: 4; number of tables: 2
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.
Key words: interpersonal distance, forgiveness, reactive attitude,
frontal alpha asymmetry, P3
Introduction
Interpersonal frictions and conflicts
are inevitable in social life, thus, how to cope with these negative
social events has become a hot-spot issue. Forgiveness, defined as a
motivational shift from retaliation and avoidance towards increased
goodwill for the wrongdoer, is deemed as a powerful coping strategy that
could avoid a clash, promote social harmony, and improve personal
well-being (Fourie et al., 2020;
Slavich et al., 2019; Toussaint et
al., 2016). Studies suggested that interpersonal distance modulates
forgiveness. Plenty of evidence showed that the closer victims feel to
their wrongdoers, the more likely they are to
forgive. Typically, Karremans &
Aarts (2007) required participants to engage in the given offensive
situations and to report their extent of forgiveness in both no-time
pressure and high-time pressure conditions. They found that, even under
high time pressure, people were still inclined to forgive a wrongdoer to
whom they feel closer or more committed (Karremans & Aarts, 2007),
suggesting the relatively automatic in forgiving close ones. Whereas,
there are also seemingly contradictory findings. The multi-motive model
of responding to offense proposed that being offended (e.g.,
discrimination, stigmatization, or ostracism) by an acquaintance leads
to more hurtful feelings, because of the violation of positive
expectations about their close relationships (see Smart & Leary, 2009
for a review). Also, laboratory evidence suggested that individuals felt
worse when receiving rejection feedback from friends than strangers
(Rajchert et al., 2019). Indeed,
offensive behaviors from the intimate are deeply engraved upon our minds
and correspondingly harder to let go; as the saying goes,
love well, whip well (in Chinese:
“爱之深,责之切”). Of note, forgiveness is an intricate psychosocial
phenomenon and conforms to Chinese culture, where individuals are
expected to be friendly and compassionate especially toward their
acquaintances. And thus the benefit of closeness on forgiveness
indicated via explicit measures (e.g., self-reported rating) is likely
to be affected by social expectation. The present study attempted to
employ an objective measure to further uncover the relationship between
interpersonal distance and forgiveness.
One of the potential and frequently used methods in the psychosocial
domain is the Implicit Association Test (Vianello & Bar-Anan, 2021).
Evidence from social cognition research has shown that this implicit
method has the potential to address limitations of explicit measures,
such as social desirability bias, and could produce more reliable and
robust results (Goldring & Strelan, 2017; Vianello & Bar-Anan, 2021).
According to its premise, individuals show a response bias toward the
well-associated information, that is, they tend to categorize stimuli
more quickly when the combinations (i.e., target and attributive words)
are congruent relative to incongruent with their inner attitudes
(Fleischhauer et al., 2014; Greenwald et al., 1998; Lou et al., 2021).
For instance, researchers found that the implicit self-forgiveness bias,
which is a tendency for individuals to relate themselves more to
forgiveness rather than to vengeance items, was positively correlated
with their tendency to forgive (Goldring & Strelan, 2017). However, no
study to date has investigated whether the observed impact of closeness
on forgiveness remains significant, even when measured implicitly. The
initial focus of the present study was to untangle this issue via the
implicit association test so to examine pure attitudes toward wrongdoers
with varied interpersonal distance.
This study also expanded on previous studies by investigating neural
responses related to reactive attitudes toward wrongdoers. Given that
the Implicit Association Test mirrors the operation of fast-acting
automatic processes (Fleischhauer et al., 2014), we employed the
event-related potentials (ERPs) technology to record the time course of
brain activity. Studies have shown that the N2, a negative component
localized in the medial prefrontal cortex and peaking at 250 to 350 ms,
occurred for early conflict monitor (Clayson & Larson, 2013). A larger
N2 amplitudes were frequently found when stimuli mismatch expectations
or when responses or thoughts have to be inhibited (Fleischhauer et al.,
2014; see Folstein & Van Petten, 2008 for a review), that is,
particularly in incongruent relative to congruent conditions in the
Implicit Association Test. The frontal P3 is another common index,
peaked at around 350 ms, and enhanced P3 amplitude reflects increased
motivational encoding and cognitive efforts (Hajcak & Foti, 2020; Xie
et al., 2022; Yuan et al., 2022). Besides the ERPs, alpha band
(8~13 Hz) oscillation is considered to be an inverse
measure of cortical activity that higher alpha oscillation indicates
greater cerebral inhibition (Compton et al., 2011). The theory of
frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) proposes that a positive value of FAA,
which is calculated as the difference between the counterparts of right-
and left-hemispheric electrodes, is positively linked to the activity of
the left prefrontal network; and a negative value of FAA represents the
dominant activity in the right prefrontal network (Boksem et al., 2012;
Galang & Obhi, 2019). Relevantly, Jackson et al. (2003) found in an
image browsing task that individuals with higher values of FAA exhibited
lower startle magnitudes when viewing negative images, suggesting the
association between increased activity in the left prefrontal cortex and
automatic emotion regulation. Indeed, forgiveness decision is a taxing
process that involved but is not limited to emotion inhibition and
regulation of negative feelings, thoughts, or motivations toward
wrongdoers (Pronk et al., 2010). Hence, the incline of forgiveness
toward friend-wrongdoer might be revealed by the FAA value.
Overall, though previous pioneering works have provided valuable
insights and methods to explore this intricate psychosocial phenomenon
(i.e., forgiveness; Dorn et al., 2014; Goldring & Strelan, 2017;
Karremans & Aarts, 2007), there is still a long way to uncover the pure
effect due to the bias of self-reported measure toward social
expectations. Another literature gap prompting this study is the neural
mechanism underlying forgiveness. Evidence has suggested that cognitive
control and the corresponding prefrontal network play a vital role in
forgiveness implementation (Maier et al., 2018, 2021), while whether the
neural responses differ between varied wrongdoers is unexplored.
Uncovering the above two issues is necessary not only for understanding
the pure relationship between closeness and forgiveness and the
potential neural mechanism, but also providing valuable implications for
interpersonal connectivity and conflict coping.
To disentangle the reactive attitude and neural correlate issues
proposed above, this study utilized the adapted version of the Taylor
Aggression Paradigm, in which we manipulated the proportions of
high-intensity noise to transiently induce mild and physical distress
(see also Beyens et al., 2015). Our prior study (Li et al., 2021) showed
that when equal amounts of noise were chosen by friends and strangers
nominally, participants experienced comparable levels of offense. The
word identification test (an adapted version of the Implicit Association
Test) was the primary task to explore the pure effect of reactive
attitudes towards varied wrongdoers, where participants were instructed
to categorize forgive- and complain-related words but ignore the names
of their friends or strangers below. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was
recorded during the task. The hypothesis of this study is two-fold. For
the friend-wrongdoer, we expected that individuals took longer to
categorize the “complain-friend” as opposed to the “forgive-friend”
word pairs, as the latter is congruent with their inner attitudes.
Meanwhile, individuals recruited more cognitive resources to suppress
the incongruent information (i.e., “complain-friend” combinations).
While for the stranger-wrongdoer, considering the instinctive response
after being offended (Maier et al., 2021; Ochsner et al., 2012; Pronk et
al., 2010), we expected that individuals would pay more attention to the
“complain-stranger” parings, reflected in shorter reaction time and
greater neural encoding relative to forgive-label combinations.
Methods
Participants
A prior analysis was performed by G*Power 3.1.9 (F tests, ANOVA:
repeated measures, within factors) with a medium effect size (f =
0.25) at the 0.05 level. Accordingly, thirty-six participants in total
would ensure 95% statistical power. We finally recruited forty-two
college students in our experiment (mean ± standard deviation, 22.5 ±
2.0 years old; 19 men) to ensure a higher statistical power. All
participants were healthy and medical-free at the time of the experiment
and had no history of neurological, psychiatric, or cognitive disorders.
All participants were right-handed, with normal or corrected-to-normal
vision. Three individuals were excluded due to their poor behavioral
performance (response accuracy lower than 80%), and two individuals
were excluded for the excessive EEG artifact, leaving thirty-seven
participants for further analyses. Study protocols were approved by the
Ethical Committee of Shanghai Normal University. Informed consent was
obtained from each participant before the experiment.
It should be noted that the online recruitment advertisement included a
scale (Inclusion of Other in the Self scale, see the Materials for
details) to measure the interpersonal distance between participants and
their same-gender close friends. Only the dyads who both scored above
medium (i.e., 4 points) were enrolled in the formal experiment.
Experimental design
This was a within-subject designed study. The first factor wasattitude , i.e., forgive and complain. And the second factor wasinterpersonal distance , i.e., friend and stranger. Thus, four
conditions in total were involved in this study, i.e., forgive-friend
(Forg-Fri), complain-friend
(Comp-Fri), forgive-stranger (Forg-Str), and complain-stranger
(Comp-Str).
Materials
Inclusion
of Other in the Self (IOS) Scale .
The interpersonal distance was
measured with the IOS scale, a single-item pictorial measure of
perceived closeness (Aron et al., 1992). The IOS scale consists of seven
pairs of circles with varying degrees of overlap, one circle
representing oneself and one for others (See Figure 1). Participants
were required to indicate which pair
of circles best portrayed their relationship with a specific individual
(Gächter et al., 2015). Responses were recorded on a 7-point scale (1
being non-overlapping, and 7 being almost complete overlap), and a
higher score means closer interpersonal distance. This single-item scale
has been widely used cross-culturally and proved to be a highly reliable
indicator of interpersonal distance (Branand et al., 2019).