Disgust as embodied moral judgment

The neural mechanisms of affect infusion in social economic decision-making: a mediating role of the anterior insula

Though emotions have been shown to have sometimes dramatic effects on decision-making, the neural mechanisms mediating these biases are relatively unexplored. Here, we investigated how incidental affect (i.e. emotional states unrelated to the decision at hand) may influence decisions, and how these biases are implemented in the brain. Nineteen adult participants made decisions which involved accepting or rejecting monetary offers from others in an Ultimatum Game while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Prior to each set of decisions, participants watched a short video clip aimed at inducing either a sad or neutral emotional state. Results demonstrated that, as expected, sad participants rejected more unfair offers than those in the neutral condition. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that receiving unfair offers while in a sad mood elicited activity in brain areas related to aversive emotional states and somatosensory integration (anterior insula) and to cognitive conflict (anterior cingulate cortex). Sad participants also showed a diminished sensitivity in neural regions associated with reward processing (ventral striatum). Importantly, insular activation uniquely mediated the relationship between sadness and decision bias. This study is the first to reveal how subtle mood states can be integrated at the neural level to influence decision-making.

Factor Structure of the Disgust Scale–Revised in an Adolescent Sample

Although recent research with the Disgust Scale–Revised (DS-R) has contributed to current knowledge regarding the structure of disgust, this line of research has exclusively employed adult samples. The current study extended existing research by examining the factor structure of the DS-R in an adolescent sample ( N = 637). Exploratory factor analysis revealed three factors: Contagion, Mortality, and Contact Disgust. Subsequent to removing three items due to inadequate factor loadings, confirmatory factor analysis provided support for the 3-factor model across gender, grade level, and racial subgroups. Tests of item–intercept invariance also revealed no differences in item means across grade level. However, three and four items were associated with differences across race and gender, respectively. Latent factor means were also found to be invariant across racial groups and grade level, but not across gender. Implications of the DS-R factor structure in this adolescent sample and its domains are discussed.

Understanding disgust

Disgust is characterized by a remarkably diverse set of stimulus triggers, ranging from extremely concrete (bad tastes and disease vectors) to extremely abstract (moral transgressions and those who commit them). This diversity may reflect an expansion of the role of disgust over evolutionary time, from an origin in defending the body against toxicity and disease, through defense against other threats to biological fitness (e.g., incest), to involvement in the selection of suitable interaction partners, by motivating the rejection of individuals who violate social and moral norms. The anterior insula, and to a lesser extent the basal ganglia, are implicated in toxicity- and disease-related forms of disgust, although we argue that insular activation is not exclusive to disgust. It remains unclear whether moral disgust is associated with insular activity. Disgust offers cognitive neuroscientists a unique opportunity to study how an evolutionarily ancient response rooted in the chemical senses has expanded into a uniquely human social cognitive domain; many interesting research avenues remain to be explored.

Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting

In two large samples (combined N = 31,045), we found a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and political conservatism. This relationship held when controlling for a number of demographic variables as well as the “Big Five” personality traits. Disgust sensitivity was also associated with more conservative voting in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In Study 2, we replicated the disgust sensitivity–conservatism relationship in an international sample of respondents from 121 different countries. Across both samples, contamination disgust, which reflects a heightened concern with interpersonally transmitted disease and pathogens, was most strongly associated with conservatism.

Disgust enhances the recollection of negative emotional images

Memory is typically better for emotional relative to neutral images, an effect generally considered to be mediated by arousal. However, this explanation cannot explain the full pattern of findings in the literature. Two experiments are reported that investigate the differential effects of categorical affective states upon emotional memory and the contributions of stimulus dimensions other than pleasantness and arousal to any memory advantage. In Experiment 1, disgusting images were better remembered than equally unpleasant frightening ones, despite the disgusting images being less arousing. In Experiment 2, regression analyses identified affective impact--a factor shown previously to influence the allocation of visual attention and amygdala response to negative emotional images--as the strongest predictor of remembering. These findings raise significant issues that the arousal account of emotional memory cannot readily address. The term impact refers to an undifferentiated emotional response to a stimulus, without requiring detailed consideration of specific dimensions of image content. We argue that ratings of impact relate to how the self is affected. The present data call for further consideration of the theoretical specifications of the mechanisms that lead to enhanced memory for emotional stimuli and their neural substrates.

Wiping the Slate Clean

Cleaning one’s hands removes more than physical contaminants; it also removes residues of the past—from the guilt of past transgressions to doubts about past decisions. We review recent evidence for these and other clean-slate effects from the perspectives of neural reuse, grounded cognition, and conceptual metaphor; discuss their implications; and suggest promising future directions.

Lateral OFC activity predicts decision bias due to first impressions during ultimatum games

Despite the prevalence and potentially harmful consequences of first impression bias during social decision-making, its precise neural underpinnings remain unclear. Here, on the basis of the fMRI study using ultimatum games, the authors show that the responders' decisions to accept or reject offers were significantly affected by facial trustworthiness of proposers. Analysis using a model-based fMRI method revealed that activity in the right lateral OFC (lOFC) of responders increased as a function of negative decision bias, indicating a greater likelihood of rejecting otherwise fair offers, possibly because of the facial trustworthiness of proposers. In addition, lOFC showed changes in functional connectivity strength with amygdala and insula as a function of decision bias, and individual differences in the strengths of connectivities between lOFC and bilateral insula were also found to predict the likelihood of responders to reject offers from untrustworthy-looking proposers. The present findings emphasize that the lOFC plays a pivotal role in integrating signals related to facial impression and creating signal biasing decisions during social interactions.

Effects of anger, guilt, and envy on moral hypocrisy

In the current article the authors examined the impact of specific emotions on moral hypocrisy, the tendency among people to judge others more severely than they judge themselves. In two studies, they found that (a) anger increased moral hypocrisy, (b) guilt eliminated moral hypocrisy, and (c) envy reversed moral hypocrisy. In particular, these findings were observed in two domains. In Study 1, participants responded to moral dilemmas describing unethical behavior and rated how acceptable it would be if others engaged in the unethical behavior, or alternatively, if they themselves engaged in the unethical behavior. In Study 2, participants were asked how much they would like to donate to research on cancer, or alternatively, how much they think others should donate. The results demonstrate that specific emotions influence moral decision making, even when real money is at stake, and that emotions of the same valence have opposing effects on moral judgment.

Harming kin to save strangers: further evidence for abnormally utilitarian moral judgments after ventromedial prefrontal damage

The ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) has been implicated as a critical neural substrate mediating the influence of emotion on moral reasoning. It has been shown that the vmPFC is especially important for making moral judgments about "high-conflict" moral dilemmas involving direct personal actions, that is, scenarios that pit compelling utilitarian considerations of aggregate welfare against the highly emotionally aversive act of directly causing harm to others [Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., et al. Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgments. Nature, 446, 908-911, 2007]. The current study was designed to elucidate further the role of the vmPFC in high-conflict moral judgments, including those that involve indirect personal actions, such as indirectly causing harm to one's kin to save a group of strangers. We found that patients with vmPFC lesions were more likely than brain-damaged and healthy comparison participants to endorse utilitarian outcomes on high-conflict dilemmas regardless of whether the dilemmas (1) entailed direct versus indirect personal harms and (2) were presented from the Self versus Other perspective. In addition, all groups were more likely to endorse utilitarian outcomes in the Other perspective as compared with the Self perspective. These results provide important extensions of previous work, and the findings align with the proposal that the vmPFC is critical for reasoning about moral dilemmas in which anticipating the social-emotional consequences of an action (e.g., guilt or remorse) is crucial for normal moral judgments [Greene, J. D. Why are VMPFC patients more utilitarian?: A dual-process theory of moral judgment explains. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 322-323, 2007; Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., et al. Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgments. Nature, 446, 908-911, 2007].

Clean, Proper and Tidy Are More Than the Absence of Dirty, Disgusting and Wrong

The desire to feel clean and pure might not merely be the absence of contamination and resulting feelings of disgust. Instead, it might have a social function because early in evolution social grooming not only involved improved personal hygiene and cleanliness, but also increased group cohesion. Thus, knowing that one’s body is clean, proper and tidy might have social implications that go beyond morality.

Moral Universals and Individual Differences

Contemporary moral psychology has focused on the notion of a universal moral sense, robust to individual and cultural differences. Yet recent evidence has revealed individual differences in the psychological processes for moral judgment: controlled cognition, mental-state reasoning, and emotional responding. We discuss this evidence and its relation to cross-cultural diversity in morality.

Emotions as Moral Amplifiers: An Appraisal Tendency Approach to the Influences of Distinct Emotions upon Moral Judgment

In this article, we advance the perspective that distinct emotions amplify different moral judgments, based on the emotion’s core appraisals. This theorizing yields four insights into the way emotions shape moral judgment. We submit that there are two kinds of specificity in the impact of emotion upon moral judgment: domain specificity and emotion specificity. We further contend that the unique embodied aspects of an emotion, such as nonverbal expressions and physiological responses, contribute to an emotion’s impact on moral judgment. Finally, emotions play a key role in determining which issues acquire moral significance in a society over time, in a process known as moralization (Rozin, 1999). The implications of these four observations for future research on emotion and morality are discussed.

Varieties of Moral Emotional Experience

Although much research on emotion and morality has treated emotion as a relatively undifferentiated construct, recent work shows that moral transgressions can evoke a variety of distinct emotions. To accommodate these results, we propose a multiple-appraisal model in which distinct appraisals lead to different moral emotions. The implications of this model for our understanding of the relationship between appraisals, emotions and judgments are discussed. The complexity of moral emotional experience presents a methodological challenge to researchers, but we submit that a complete understanding of human morality must acknowledge the differentiated nature of moral emotions.

Emotion and Morality in Psychopathy and Paraphilias

Understanding the role of emotion in moral judgment has been an active area of investigation and debate. Here we comment on this topic by examining the interaction between emotion and moral judgment in certain psychopathological groups that are characterized by abnormalities in emotion processing, such as psychopaths and sexual offenders with paraphilic disorders.

Surveillance cues enhance moral condemnation

Humans pay close attention to the reputational consequences of their actions. Recent experiments indicate that even very subtle cues that one is being observed can affect cooperative behaviors. Expressing our opinions about the morality of certain acts is a key means of advertising our cooperative dispositions. Here, we investigated how subtle cues of being watched would affect moral judgments. We predicted that participants exposed to such cues would affirm their endorsement of prevailing moral norms by expressing greater disapproval of moral transgressions. Participants read brief accounts of two moral violations and rated the moral acceptability of each violation. Violations were more strongly condemned in a condition where participants were exposed to surveillance cues (an image of eyes interposed between the description of the violation and the associated rating scale) than in a control condition (in which the interposed image was of flowers). We discuss the role that public declarations play in the interpersonal evaluation of cooperative dispositions.

Surveillance Cues Enhance Moral Condemnation

Humans pay close attention to the reputational consequences of their actions. Recent experiments indicate that even very subtle cues that one is being observed can affect cooperative behaviors. Expressing our opinions about the morality of certain acts is a key means of advertising our cooperative dispositions. Here, we investigated how subtle cues of being watched would affect moral judgments. We predicted that participants exposed to such cues would affirm their endorsement of prevailing moral norms by expressing greater disapproval of moral transgressions. Participants read brief accounts of two moral violations and rated the moral acceptability of each violation. Violations were more strongly condemned in a condition where participants were exposed to surveillance cues (an image of eyes interposed between the description of the violation and the associated rating scale) than in a control condition (in which the interposed image was of flowers). We discuss the role that public declarations play in the interpersonal evaluation of cooperative dispositions.

Neuroethics: A New Way of Doing Ethics

The aim of this article is to argue, by example, for neuroethics as a new way of doing ethics. Rather than simply giving us a new subject matter—the ethical issues arising from neuroscience—to attend to, neuroethics offers us the opportunity to refine the tools we use. Ethicists often need to appeal to the intuitions provoked by consideration of cases to evaluate the permissibility of types of actions; data from the sciences of the mind give us reason to believe that some of these intuitions are less reliable than others. I focus on the doctrine of double effect to illustrate my case, arguing that experimental results suggest that appeal to it might be question-begging. The doctrine of double effect is supposed to show that there is a moral difference between effects that are brought about intentionally and those that are merely foreseen; I argue that the data suggest that we regard some effects as merely foreseen only because we regard bringing them about as permissible. Appeal to the doctrine of double effect therefore cannot establish that there are such moral differences.

Dirty liberals! Reminders of physical cleanliness influence moral and political attitudes

Many moral codes place a special emphasis on bodily purity, and manipulations that directly target bodily purity have been shown to influence a variety of moral judgments. Across two studies, we demonstrated that reminders of physical purity influence specific moral judgments regarding behaviors in the sexual domain as well as broad political attitudes. In Study 1, individuals in a public setting who were given a reminder of physical cleansing reported being more politically conservative than did individuals who were not given such a reminder. In Study 2, individuals reminded of physical cleansing in the laboratory demonstrated harsher moral judgments toward violations of sexual purity and were more likely to report being politically conservative than control participants. Together, these experiments provide further evidence of a deep link between physical purity and moral judgment, and they offer preliminary evidence that manipulations of physical purity can influence general (and putatively stable) political attitudes.

A bad taste in the mouth: gustatory disgust influences moral judgment

Can sweet-tasting substances trigger kind, favorable judgments about other people? What about substances that are disgusting and bitter? Various studies have linked physical disgust to moral disgust, but despite the rich and sometimes striking findings these studies have yielded, no research has explored morality in conjunction with taste, which can vary greatly and may differentially affect cognition. The research reported here tested the effects of taste perception on moral judgments. After consuming a sweet beverage, a bitter beverage, or water, participants rated a variety of moral transgressions. Results showed that taste perception significantly affected moral judgments, such that physical disgust (induced via a bitter taste) elicited feelings of moral disgust. Further, this effect was more pronounced in participants with politically conservative views than in participants with politically liberal views. Taken together, these differential findings suggest that embodied gustatory experiences may affect moral processing more than previously thought.

Transgressions and Expressions

Recent investigations into morality suggest that affective responses may precede moral judgments. The present study investigated, first, whether individuals show specific facial affect in response to moral behaviors and, second, whether the intensity of facial affect predicts subsequent moral judgments. Muscle activity relating to disgust (levator labii), anger (corrugator supercilii), and positive affect (zygomaticus major) was recorded while participants considered third-person statements describing good and bad behaviors across five foundations of morality (purity, fairness, harm, authority, and ingroup). Facial disgust was highest in response to purity violations, followed by fairness violations. In contrast, harm violations evoked anger expressions. Importantly, the extremity of subsequent moral judgments was predicted by facial affect, such that judgments about purity and fairness correlated with facial disgust, harm correlated with facial anger, and ingroup correlated with positive facial affect. These results demonstrate that individuals spontaneously exhibit domain-specific moral affect that allows inferences about their moral judgments.

Bradygastric activity of the stomach predicts disgust sensitivity and perceived disgust intensity

The aim of this study was to investigate gastric and non-gastric autonomic responses to disgusting pictures and to assess the relationship between autonomic changes, disgust sensitivity, and perceived disgust intensity. Healthy participants viewed pictures with affectively neutral or disgusting content of either a high or moderate arousal level. Electrogastrogram, electrocardiogram, and electrodermal activity were recorded, and participants' disgust sensitivity and disgust intensity were assessed. No main effect of condition on gastric myoelectrical activity was found. However, stepwise regression analyses indicated that the percentage of bradygastria predicted disgust ratings in case of the highly arousing disgust pictures. When moderately arousing pictures were shown, disgust ratings were predicted by disgust sensitivity, which in turn was predicted by the percentage of bradygastria. Heart periods and respiratory sinus arrhythmia increased to a similar extent during both the highly arousing and moderately arousing picture blocks, while a tendency for larger skin conductance responses during the highly arousing picture block was shown. The results suggest that feelings of disgust may be specifically related to increased bradygastria, which may represent a prodromal sign of vomiting.

Serotonin selectively influences moral judgment and behavior through effects on harm aversion

Aversive emotional reactions to real or imagined social harms infuse moral judgment and motivate prosocial behavior. Here, we show that the neurotransmitter serotonin directly alters both moral judgment and behavior through increasing subjects' aversion to personally harming others. We enhanced serotonin in healthy volunteers with citalopram (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) and contrasted its effects with both a pharmacological control treatment and a placebo on tests of moral judgment and behavior. We measured the drugs' effects on moral judgment in a set of moral 'dilemmas' pitting utilitarian outcomes (e.g., saving five lives) against highly aversive harmful actions (e.g., killing an innocent person). Enhancing serotonin made subjects more likely to judge harmful actions as forbidden, but only in cases where harms were emotionally salient. This harm-avoidant bias after citalopram was also evident in behavior during the ultimatum game, in which subjects decide to accept or reject fair or unfair monetary offers from another player. Rejecting unfair offers enforces a fairness norm but also harms the other player financially. Enhancing serotonin made subjects less likely to reject unfair offers. Furthermore, the prosocial effects of citalopram varied as a function of trait empathy. Individuals high in trait empathy showed stronger effects of citalopram on moral judgment and behavior than individuals low in trait empathy. Together, these findings provide unique evidence that serotonin could promote prosocial behavior by enhancing harm aversion, a prosocial sentiment that directly affects both moral judgment and moral behavior.

A Process Model of Affect Misattribution

People often misattribute the causes of their thoughts and feelings. The authors propose a multinomial process model of affect misattributions, which separates three component processes. The first is an affective response to the true cause of affect. The second is an affective response to the apparent cause. The third process is when the apparent source is confused for the real source. The model is validated using the affect misattribution procedure (AMP), which uses misattributions as a means to implicitly measure attitudes. The model illuminates not only the AMP but also other phenomena in which researchers wish to model the processes underlying misattributions using subjective judgments.

Beyond revenge: neural and genetic bases of altruistic punishment

It is still debated how altruistic punishment as one form of strong reciprocity has established during evolution and which motives may underlie such behavior. Recent neuroscientific evidence on the activation of brain reward regions during altruistic punishment in two-person one-shot exchange games suggests satisfaction through the punishment of norm violations as one underlying motive. In order to address this issue in more detail, we used fMRI during a one-shot economic exchange game that warrants strong reciprocity by introducing a third party punishment condition wherein revenge is unlikely to play a role. We report here that indeed, reward regions such as the nucleus accumbens showed punishment-related activation. Moreover, we provide preliminary evidence that genetic variation of dopamine turnover impacts similarly on punishment-related nucleus accumbens activation during both first person and third party punishment. The overall pattern of results suggests a common cognitive-affective-motivational network as the driving force for altruistic punishment, with only quantitative differences between first person and third party perspectives.

How clinicians make (or avoid) moral judgments of patients: implications of the evidence for relationships and research

Physicians, nurses, and other clinicians readily acknowledge being troubled by encounters with patients who trigger moral judgments. For decades social scientists have noted that moral judgment of patients is pervasive, occurring not only in egregious and criminal cases but also in everyday situations in which appraisals of patients' social worth and culpability are routine. There is scant literature, however, on the actual prevalence and dynamics of moral judgment in healthcare. The indirect evidence available suggests that moral appraisals function via a complex calculus that reflects variation in patient characteristics, clinician characteristics, task, and organizational factors. The full impact of moral judgment on healthcare relationships, patient outcomes, and clinicians' own well-being is yet unknown. The paucity of attention to moral judgment, despite its significance for patient-centered care, communication, empathy, professionalism, healthcare education, stereotyping, and outcome disparities, represents a blind spot that merits explanation and repair. New methodologies in social psychology and neuroscience have yielded models for how moral judgment operates in healthcare and how research in this area should proceed. Clinicians, educators, and researchers would do well to recognize both the legitimate and illegitimate moral appraisals that are apt to occur in healthcare settings.

Benign Violations

Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance from the violation. We tested the benign-violation hypothesis in the domain of moral psychology, where there is a strong documented association between moral violations and negative emotions, particularly disgust. Five experimental studies show that benign moral violations tend to elicit laughter and amusement in addition to disgust. Furthermore, seeing a violation as both wrong and not wrong mediates behavioral displays of humor. Our account is consistent with evolutionary accounts of laughter, explains humor across many domains, and suggests that humor can accompany negative emotion.

Toward an integrated neuroscience of morality: the contribution of neuroeconomics to moral cognition

Interest in the neural processes underlying decision making has led to a flurry of recent research in the fields of both moral psychology and neuroeconomics. In this paper, we first review some important findings from both disciplines, and then argue that the two fields can mutually benefit each other. A more explicit recognition of the role of values and norms will likely lead to more accurate models of decision making for neuroeconomists, whereas the tasks, insights into neural mechanisms, and mathematical modeling common in neuroeconomic research offer moral psychologists the opportunity to expand their field and move beyond methodological limitations that may have hindered the field's progress to this point. We conclude by highlighting an exciting group of recent studies that illustrate the potential of research that embraces the integrated moral/neuroeconomic approach that we suggest here.

Risk perception and moralization among smokers in the USA and Denmark: a qualitative approach

OBJECTIVES

The present research explored the role that culture plays in smokers' description of their risk perceptions and experiences as targets of moralization.

METHODS

We conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 15 smokers each from Denmark (a smoking-lenient culture) and the USA (a smoking-prohibitive culture).

RESULTS

Smokers said they were well aware of the risks of smoking yet minimized the risks of active and passive smoking; Danes were particularly likely to minimize these risks. Smokers also described many experiences as targets of moralization and accepted some elements of moralized attitudes although overall Danes more strongly rejected moralized opinions. Smokers described adjusting to moralization by changing when and where but not how much they smoked.

CONCLUSION

It is important to consider cultural influences on moralization and risk perception of smoking.

Psychopaths know right from wrong but don't care

Adult psychopaths have deficits in emotional processing and inhibitory control, engage in morally inappropriate behavior, and generally fail to distinguish moral from conventional violations. These observations, together with a dominant tradition in the discipline which sees emotional processes as causally necessary for moral judgment, have led to the conclusion that psychopaths lack an understanding of moral rights and wrongs. We test an alternative explanation: psychopaths have normal understanding of right and wrong, but abnormal regulation of morally appropriate behavior. We presented psychopaths with moral dilemmas, contrasting their judgments with age- and sex-matched (i) healthy subjects and (ii) non-psychopathic, delinquents. Subjects in each group judged cases of personal harms (i.e. requiring physical contact) as less permissible than impersonal harms, even though both types of harms led to utilitarian gains. Importantly, however, psychopaths' pattern of judgments on different dilemmas was the same as those of the other subjects. These results force a rejection of the strong hypothesis that emotional processes are causally necessary for judgments of moral dilemmas, suggesting instead that psychopaths understand the distinction between right and wrong, but do not care about such knowledge, or the consequences that ensue from their morally inappropriate behavior.

How can studying psychopaths help us understand the neural mechanisms of moral judgment?

There is growing interest in the neural basis of human moral cognition, in hopes that neuroscience can help to explain the general process of moral judgment. The role of emotion and cognition in moral judgment has yet to be determined. The study of psychopathic traits may be able to give us some insight into this because of their deficits in emotional responding. Our recent publication in Molecular Psychiatry addresses this issue by examining how brain functioning during moral decision-making varies as a function of psychopathic traits.

The BCN Challenge to Compatibilist Free Will and Personal Responsibility

Many philosophers ignore developments in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences that purport to challenge our ideas of free will and responsibility. The reason for this is that the challenge is often framed as a denial of the idea that we are able to act differently than we do. However, most philosophers think that the ability to do otherwise is irrelevant to responsibility and free will. Rather it is our ability to act for reasons that is crucial. We argue that the scientific findings indicate that it is not so obvious that our views of free will and responsibility can be grounded in the ability to act for reasons without introducing metaphysical obscurities. This poses a challenge to philosophers. We draw the conclusion that philosophers are wrong not to address the recent scientific developments and that scientists are mistaken in formulating their challenge in terms of the freedom to do otherwise.