No abstract

This research investigated whether the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is known to code the value of various rewards, is involved in the relationship value recalibration process. Previous research suggests that people upregulate the relationship value of a specific friend in response to the friend's commitment signals. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study (Study 1), participants imagined receiving high-cost commitment signals, low-cost commitment signals, or no signals from a particular friend. Participants' subjective rating of the relationship value upregulation was positively correlated with medial OFC activity. Subtraction analyses showed that highcost commitment signals engaged the medial OFC more than did signal failures. An auxiliary analysis revealed that medial OFC activity in response to low-cost commitment signals was negatively correlated with loneliness. To follow-up these findings, we conducted an online vignette study (Study 2), in which participants rated the relationship value of a real friend before and after imagining receiving a series of low-cost commitment signals from that friend. Corroborating the upregulation hypothesis, perceived relationship value significantly increased after imagining a series of commitment signals. This effect was weaker among individuals high in loneliness.

The lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) plays a critical role in inhibiting self-perspective information, which is necessary for theory of mind (ToM) processing. Additionally, previous research has indicated that negative emotions interfere with lPFC activation during executive tasks. In this study, we hypothesized that negative emotions would inhibit lPFC activation during a ToM task. While female participants performed the director task following the observation of emotionally laden movies (neutral/negative/positive), their prefrontal hemodynamic activity was measured using near-infrared spectroscopy. After viewing the neutral movie, bilateral lPFC activity was significantly enhanced during ToM process compared to the control condition. In contrast, after viewing the negative movie, left lPFC activity during ToM process was significantly impaired. These results were interpreted to support the idea that negative emotions interfere with inhibition of self-perspective information through inactivation of the lPFC.

Apologies by political leaders to the citizens of a victimized country have attracted attention in recent years as a means of improving relations between nations. Existing studies have identified several elements that make such an apology effective, but from the politician's point of view, it is difficult to issue a statement containing all these elements, and they must then be chosen while considering domestic backlash and relations with countries other than the victimized one. However, it is not sufficiently clear how the victimized country's citizens weigh the elements of the apology when they accept it and how the nature of the harm caused changes this. Therefore, we conducted a survey experiment in Japan, adopting a conjoint design using scenarios depicting fictional US presidential apologies to Japan. Our experiment demonstrated three attributes particularly regarded as important in determining whether people would accept an apology: the reparation amount, whether the apology was official (formality), and the voluntariness of the apology. However, when something that people consider “sacred” has been harmed, reparation proposals are counterproductive, and the optimal apology form may depend on the nature of the harm.