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).