Mentalizing in Reactance: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Freedom Threats

Abstract

Psychological reactance is a motivational state that leads people to regain threatened or lost freedoms. It is accompaniedbyangerandnegativecognitionsandcausesvarious effectssuch as resistance, aggression, and increased attractiveness of the original freedom. Despite a wealth of studies exploring the causes and con sequences of reactance, there has been little effort to understand the phenomenon of reactance itself. To learn moreaboutthe state of reactance itself and to distinguish it from the related construct of anger, we used func tional magnetic resonanceimaging.Weaskedparticipantstoreadandimaginebeinginfreedom-threatening, anger-arousing, and neutral scenarios. Using the Neurosynth image decoder, we discovered that, compared to the neutral and anger-arousing scenarios, the freedom-threatening scenarios produced a pattern of activa tion characteristic of imaging studies that feature terms such as theory of mind, mental states, and mentaliz ing. This suggests that when people are led to imagine experiences in which their freedom is restricted, they exhibit a pattern of brain activation that resembles activation patterns found in mentalizing studies, and this is not due to the affective consequence of reactance (i.e., anger).