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

Psychological reactance is a motivational state that leads people to regain threatened or lost freedoms. It is accompanied by anger and negative cognitions and causes various effects such as resistance, aggression, and increased attractiveness of the original freedom. Despite a wealth of studies exploring the causes and consequences of reactance, there has been little effort to understand the phenomenon of reactance itself. To learn more about the state of reactance itself and to distinguish it from the related construct of anger, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging. We asked participants to read and imagine being in freedom-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 activation characteristic of imaging studies that feature terms such as theory of mind, mental states, and mentalizing. 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).