The competition dynamics of approach and avoidance motivations following interpersonal transgression.

Two behavioral motivations coexist in transgressors following an interpersonal transgression-approaching and compensating the victim and avoiding the victim. Little is known about how these motivations arise, compete, and drive transgressors' decisions. The present study adopted a social interaction task to manipulate participants' (i.e., the transgressor) responsibility for another's (i.e., the victim) monetary loss and measure the participants' tradeoff between compensating the victim and avoiding face-to-face interactions with the victim. Following each transgression, participants used a computer mouse to choose between two options differing in the amount of compensation to the victim and the probability of face-to-face contact with the victim. Results showed that as participants' responsibility increased, 1) the decision weights on contact avoidance relative to compensation increased, and 2) the onset of the contact-avoidance attribute was expedited and that of the compensation attribute was delayed. These results demonstrate how competing social motivations following transgression evolve and determine social decision-making and shed light on how social-affective state modulates the dynamics of decision-making in general.

Affective evaluation of others' altruistic decisions under risk and ambiguity.

Gratitude arises when one is the target of an altruistic decision, particularly when this decision incurs cost to the agent. Here we examined how individuals evaluate others' altruistic decisions under risky (uncertainty with known probabilities) and ambiguous (uncertainty with unknown probabilities) costs and respond with gratitude and reciprocity. Participants played an interactive game in an fMRI scanner in which they would receive painful electric shocks. An anonymous co-player either intentionally (Human conditions) or unintentionally (Computer conditions) decided whether to help the participant reduce half of the pain by undertaking an amount of pain (i.e., cost) with varying level of uncertainty (Certain vs. Risky vs. Ambiguous). Participants could then transfer monetary points to the co-player knowing that the co-player was unaware of this transfer. Behaviorally, monetary allocation and gratitude rating increased as the uncertainty level of cost increased in Human conditions; these effects were reduced in Computer conditions. The effect of cost uncertainty on gratitude was mediated by the perceived kind intention behind the help. FMRI revealed both shared and differential neurocognitive substrates for evaluating the benefactor's altruistic decisions under risk and ambiguity: both were associated with fear- and anxiety-related processes, involving right lateral orbitofrontal cortex and anterior insula; ambiguity additionally recruited mentalizing- and conflict monitoring-related processes, involving dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. These findings underscore the crucial role of social uncertainty perception in the generation of gratitude.

Eye Movements Reveal Delayed Use of Construction-Based Pragmatic Information During Online Sentence Reading: A Case of Chinese Lian dou Construction.

An event-related potential (ERP) study demonstrated that construction-based pragmatic constraints in Chinese (e.g., lian…dou that constrains a low-likelihood event and is similar to even in English) can rapidly influence sentence comprehension and the mismatch of such constraints would lead to increased neural activity on the mismatching word. Here we examine to what extent readers' eye movements can instantly reveal the difficulties of mismatching constraints when participants read sentences with the structure lian + determiner phrase + object noun + subject noun + dou + verb phrase (VP) + final commenting clause. By embedding high-likelihood or neutral events in the construction, we created incongruent and underspecified sentences and compared such sentences with congruent ones describing events of low expectedness. Relative to congruent sentences, the VP region of incongruent sentences showed no significant differences on first-pass reading time measures, but the total fixation duration was reliably longer. Moreover, readers made more regressions from the VP and the sentence-final region to previous regions in the incongruent than the congruent condition. These findings suggest that the effect of pragmatic constraints is observable during naturalistic sentence reading, reflecting the activation of the construction-based pragmatic information for the late integration of linguistic and extra-linguistic information at sentential level.