Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, 40, Boulevard du Pont d'Arve, CH-1205 Geneva, Switzerland.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2013 Aug;8(6):640-6. doi: 10.1093/scan/nst019. Epub 2013 Feb 27.
When forming impressions and trying to figure out why other people behave the way they do, we should take into account not only dispositional factors (i.e., personality traits) but also situational constraints as potential causes for a behavior. However, in their attributions, people often ignore the importance of situational factors. To investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the integration of situational information into attributions, we decomposed the attribution process by separately presenting information about behaviors and about the situational circumstances in which they occur. After reading the information, participants judged whether dispositional or situational causes explained the behavior (attribution), and how much they liked the person described in the scenario (affective evaluation). The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex showed increased blood oxygenation-level-dependent activation during the encoding of situational information when the resulting attribution was situational, relative to when the attribution was dispositional, potentially reflecting a controlled process that integrates situational information into attributions. Interestingly, attributions were strongly linked to subsequent affective evaluations, with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex emerging as potential substrate of the integration of attributions and affective evaluations. Our findings demonstrate how top-down control processes regulate impression formation when situational information is taken into account to understand others.
当我们形成印象并试图弄清楚为什么别人会表现出他们的行为方式时，我们不仅应该考虑性格特征等性格因素，还应该考虑情境限制作为行为的潜在原因。然而，人们在归因时往往忽略了情境因素的重要性。为了研究将情境信息整合到归因中的神经机制，我们通过分别呈现关于行为和发生行为的情境环境的信息来分解归因过程。在阅读信息后，参与者判断是性格原因还是情境原因解释了行为（归因），以及他们对情景中描述的人的喜欢程度（情感评价）。与归因是性格原因时相比，当归因是情境原因时，背外侧前额叶皮层在情境信息的编码过程中显示出更高的血氧水平依赖激活，这可能反映了一种将情境信息整合到归因中的受控过程。有趣的是，归因与随后的情感评价密切相关，背内侧前额叶皮层成为归因和情感评价整合的潜在基础。我们的发现表明，当考虑情境信息以理解他人时，自上而下的控制过程如何调节印象形成。
