Novel Developments in Cognitive fMRI

Understanding the positive effect of financial compensation on trust after norm violations: Evidence from fMRI in favor of forgiveness.

“…Taken together, our findings, combined with the results of prior behavioral research (e.g., Dirks et al, 2011;McCullough et al, 2003;Xie & Peng, 2009) and neuroimaging studies (e.g., Strang et al, 2014;Will et al, 2015), clearly underscore that forgiveness is a necessary step for This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.…”

“…More specifically, our results revealed increased activation in the IPL extending to the TPJ (mentalizing network), inferior and superior frontal cortices (conflict-monitoring network), and AI (salience-monitoring network). Moreover, additional analyses revealed a strong overlap between Will et al's (2015) clusters associated with forgiveness and the activations reported in our study after receiving financial compensation. The importance of forgiveness was further demonstrated by our mediation approach.…”

“…Another advantage of neural measures is that they can assess internal states "online" during a psychological task. In this light, Huettel (2015) has recently argued that "many sorts of interesting internal states cannot be defined on behavior alone " (p. 563) and that fMRI has the power to "identify and describe increasingly complex internal states" (p. 558). In sum, the investigation of the neural underpinnings of harm restoration can provide unique insights into the exact mechanism through which victims of norm violations are able to respond with increased trust when receiving financial compensation.…”

Parsing the components of forgiveness: Psychological and neural mechanisms

“…For example, mapping brain activity and connectivity at different time points and during different tasks would allow separate processes and different stages underlying forgiveness to be distinguished. In this regard, fMRI is uniquely poised to identify and track complex internal states in real-time (Huettel, 2015). Furthermore, a better understanding of the neural mechanisms involved in forgiveness would allow vigorous testing of psychological hypotheses, which is not possible when using solely behavioral measures (Amodio, 2010).…”