Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activity is associated with greater situational attributions and longer blame...

Integrating situational contributors to others' behaviors is critical in blaming or praising them. While dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) has been linked to this integration, prior research was limited in investigating this association using only laboratory-crafted behavioral descriptions and snap-shot moral judgments. To address this, we examined the associations between dmPFC activities and situational explanations people elaborated on about their real-life events. Participants viewed a series of negative or positive behaviors in the scanner. After the scan, they wrote about times when they found others' behaviors blameworthy and praiseworthy, using their own words. By applying Natural language processing (NLP), we identified the amount of situational and dispositional remarks participants used to describe those behaviors. We also computed the length of these descriptions. We found that participants who recruited their dmPFC more in response to others' negative behaviors in the scanner provided more situational attributions about real-life blameworthy behavior, as well as a longer description about the behavior. These findings suggest that there may be neural profiles indicative of how much people are attentive to situational drivers of negative behaviors. However, due to the high correlation between situational attributions and the length of the behavioral descriptions, we could not distinguish whether dmPFC is associated with consideration of situational information uniquely, or with providing longer responses by potentially considering any relevant information. These findings expand the scope of research such that dmPFC may be implicated in consideration of situational contributors in deliberative, elaborative, and real-life behavioral descriptions using natural language.