Big thank you to @ycleong.bsky.social for all the guidance and support on the project! We are also grateful to EnvNeuroLab for sharing the fNIRS device and helping us get started working with fNIRS.

Finally, we found that hostile attribution bias is negatively correlated with attributional complexity, suggesting that people who tend to infer complex attributions were less likely to make hostile attributions.

Using the neural classification approach, we classified participants into high and low levels of hostile attribution bias with 75% accuracy based on fNIRS activity:

To better visualize the results of the IS-RSA, we applied multidimensional scaling (MDS) to the neural distance matrix of the left VMPFC (channel 11). We found that participants with similar hostile attribution biases were indeed closer in neural distance:

Using IS-RSA, we show that participants with similar levels of hostile attribution bias exhibited higher levels of neural synchrony in the left VMPFC while listening to the stories:

We used fNIRS to measure the neural responses of participants listening to 21 hypothetical social scenarios where a character’s actions resulted in a negative outcome for the listener.