Table 1.
Characteristics participants.
Fig 1.
Overview of the revised Social Norm Processing Task (SNPT-R).
During the story-reading phase (1), participants read stories consisting of a stem sentence and an ending sentence, describing either a neutral social situation, a situation in which a social norm was unintentionally transgressed or situation in which a social norm was violated intentionally. Participants were instructed to imagine themselves in the situation described. In the rating phase (2), participants rated all stories on embarrassment and inappropriateness.
Fig 2.
Behavioral ratings on the SNPT-R (n = 87, behavioral sample).
Stories describing intentional social norm violations were rated as more inappropriate and more embarrassing when compared to stories on unintentional social norm violations, while unintentional stories were considered more inappropriate and more embarrassing in comparison to neutral stories. Boys rated the stories as less inappropriate when compared to men and women; women rated the stories as more embarrassing in comparison to the other groups. Data are presented as means ± SD. *: p ≤ 0.05; **: p ≤ 0.01; ***: p ≤ 0.001.
Table 2.
Ratings of inappropriateness and embarrassment for the SNPT-R—behavioral sample.
Table 3.
Ratings of inappropriateness and embarrassment for the SNPT-R—imaging sample.
Table 4.
Brain activity related to reading social stories describing intentional and unintentional norm violations versus neutral situations.
Fig 3.
Significant activation clusters related to processing stories describing social norm violations.
Clusters are superimposed on the template MNI_T1_152_2mm_brain (partial brain coverage; inferior parts of the frontal medial cortex and superior parts of the postcentral gyrus are not included). All images are displayed according to radiological convention: right in image is left in brain.