A job interview in the MRI scanner: How does indirectness affect addressees and overhearers?
Publication year
2015Number of pages
13 p.
Source
Neuropsychologia, 76, (2015), pp. 79-91ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor
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Organization
SW OZ DCC PL
PI Group Neurobiology of Language
Journal title
Neuropsychologia
Volume
vol. 76
Languages used
English (eng)
Page start
p. 79
Page end
p. 91
Subject
110 000 Neurocognition of Language; DI-BCB_DCC_Theme 1: Language and CommunicationAbstract
In using language, people not only exchange information, but also navigate their social world - for example, they can express themselves indirectly to avoid losing face. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated the neural correlates of interpreting face-saving indirect replies, in a situation where participants only overheard the replies as part of a conversation between two other people, as well as in a situation where the participants were directly addressed themselves. We created a fictional job interview context where indirect replies serve as a natural communicative strategy to attenuate one's shortcomings, and asked fMRI participants to either pose scripted questions and receive answers from three putative job candidates (addressee condition) or to listen to someone else interview the same candidates (overhearer condition). In both cases, the need to evaluate the candidate ensured that participants had an active interest in comprehending the replies. Relative to direct replies, face-saving indirect replies increased activation in medial prefrontal cortex, bilateral temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral middle temporal gyrus, in active overhearers and active addressees alike, with similar effect size, and comparable to findings obtained in an earlier passive listening study (Basnakova et al., 2014). In contrast, indirectness effects in bilateral anterior insula and pregenual ACC, two regions implicated in emotional salience and empathy, were reliably stronger in addressees than in active overhearers. Our findings indicate that understanding face-saving indirect language requires additional cognitive perspective-taking and other discourse-relevant cognitive processing, to a comparable extent in active overhearers and addressees. Furthermore, they indicate that face-saving indirect language draws upon affective systems more in addressees than in overhearers, presumably because the addressee is the one being managed by a face-saving reply. In all, face-saving indirectness provides a window on the cognitive as well as affect-related neural systems involved in human communication.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [246515]
- Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging [4040]
- Electronic publications [134102]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [30494]
- Open Access publications [107633]
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