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S. Berthoz, J.L. Armony, R.J.R. Blair, R.J. Dolan, An fMRI study of intentional and

unintentional (embarassing) violations of social norms, Brain 2002, vol. 125, pp. 1696-

1708.

Summary

(a) Theses:

Thesis 1: Brain regions involved in the representation of the mental state of others (medial

prefrontal cortex, temporo-parietal regions, temporal lobe) are activated during situations of

violation of social norms.

Thesis 2: Processing social violations involves structures (lateral orbitofrontal and medial

prefrontal cortices) associated with the representation of aversive emotional reactions in

others, particularly others anger.

(b) Experimental setting:

Experiment 1: Four types of a personal (the story protagonist is you) and impersonal verbal

material (the story protagonist is a character) were presented to the participants: (1)

description of normal behaviour; (2) description of an embarassing situation for the story

protagonist (unintentional transgression of the social norm); (3) description of a situation

where the story protagonists behaviour is a violation of social norms (intentional

transgression); (4) sentences of unrelated words. The participants were asked to rate: (1)

how embarassing they thought the situation is; (2) how inappropriate they thought the

behaviour is; (3) how funny they thought the story is. No difference between the personal and

impersonal ratings was found.

Experiment 2: Normal stories were used as a reference condition to measure the activity of

brain regions. Both violation of social norms and embarassing stories activated left medial,

middle and inferior prefrontal gyrus, left orbitofrontal cortex, anterior and middle temporal

lobe.

Critical comments

1) The results doesnt show, were there any differences in brain activity, when participants

were dealing with personal and impersonal stories. This seems to be important because we

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can assume that personal violations of the social norms (both intentional and unintentional)

can trigger increased activity in brain regions involved with representation of aversive

emotional reactions in others as compared to the impersonal violations.

2) The personal/impersonal distinction of the stories is questionable as experimental

scenarios seem to describe situations where the action of the protagonist is rather voluntary or

involuntary. Intentionality is only an element of voluntariness (others being: ability to

recognize the important chararacteristics of the action, ability to control the action).