Triune ethics: The neurobiological roots of our multiple moralities

Sociomoral Temperament: A Mediator Between Wellbeing and Social Outcomes in Young Children

Social outcomes, such as empathy, conscience, and behavioral self-regulation, might require a baseline of psychological wellbeing. According to Triune Ethics Metatheory (TEM), early experience influences the neuropsychology underlying a child's orientation toward the social and moral world. Theoretically, a child's wellbeing, fostered through early caregiving, promotes sociomoral temperaments that correspond to the child's experience, such as social approach or withdrawal in face-to-face situations. These temperaments may represent an individual's default sociomoral perspective on the world. We hypothesized that sociomoral temperament emerges as a function of wellbeing and would be related to social outcomes measured by moral socialization and self-regulation. Further, we hypothesized that sociomoral temperament would mediate the relationship between wellbeing and social outcomes. To investigate, we collected items reflective of sociomoral temperament, asking mothers from two countries (USA: n = 525; China: n = 379) to report on their 3- to 5-year-old children. They also reported on their child's wellbeing (anxiety, depression, happiness) and social outcomes, including moral socialization (concern after wrong doing, internalized conduct and empathy) and behavioral self-regulation (inhibitory control and misbehavior). As expected, correlations identified connections between wellbeing, sociomoral temperament, and social outcomes. Mediation analyses demonstrated that sociomoral temperament mediated relations between wellbeing and social outcomes in both samples, though in slightly different patterns. Fostering early wellbeing may influence social outcomes through a child's developing sociomoral temperament.

Mapping Ethics Education in Accounting Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

The attention being paid to ethics education in accounting has been increasing, especially after the corporate accounting scandals at the turn of the century. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the existing research in the field of ethics education in accounting. To synthesize past research, a bibliometric analysis that references 134 primary studies is performed and three bibliometric methods are applied. First, we visualize the historical evolution of ethics education in accounting research through historiography. Second, we use bibliographic coupling to identify clusters of ethics education in accounting research before, during, and after major corporate scandals. Third, we perform a co-word analysis to connect the identified patterns into a map of a contextual space. The results reveal, in each decade, not only an increasing academic focus on this field of research, but also an increasing number of different research clusters. While the clusters Factors affecting moral judgement, Perception of ethics, and Lack of ethics topics in the last research period develop further from the respective clusters in the previous periods, Accounting beyond technical skills, Integration of ethics in accounting education, Use of developed ethics frameworks, and Professional values on the contrary develop anew in the last decade, as a consequence of a growing demand for teaching ethics. Overall, the paper presents the development patterns of ethics education in accounting research and sets up a research agenda that encourages future research.

Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside

A widespread misconception in much of psychology is that (a) as vertebrate animals evolved, “newer” brain structures were added over existing “older” brain structures, and (b) these newer, more complex structures endowed animals with newer and more complex psychological functions, behavioral flexibility, and language. This belief, although widely shared in introductory psychology textbooks, has long been discredited among neurobiologists and stands in contrast to the clear and unanimous agreement on these issues among those studying nervous-system evolution. We bring psychologists up to date on this issue by describing the more accurate model of neural evolution, and we provide examples of how this inaccurate view may have impeded progress in psychology. We urge psychologists to abandon this mistaken view of human brains.

The Implementation of an Ethical Education Curriculum in Secondary Schools in Ireland

The paper investigates teachers’ and principals’ experiences of implementing a pilot of an ethical education (EE) curriculum to a senior cycle programme in Educate Together secondary schools in Ireland. The development of this curriculum was informed by the Integrative Ethical Education Model (Lapsley and Narvaez, 2004). Thirteen teachers and two school principals were interviewed about their experiences of this curriculum and its impact on school culture and organisation. An implementation science approach informed a thematic analysis of transcripts that interrogated the perspectives of participants, and revealed the systemic factors that included barriers to, and facilitators of, EE curriculum implementation. Interviews were analysed inductively, by exploring participants’ experiences, and deductively, using Narvaez’s framework of ethical skills. Results were presented within the domains of school setting, wider school setting, curriculum characteristics and teacher characteristics, reflecting an implementation science approach. Findings suggest that this curriculum nurtured a positive school climate where students identified as having a greater sense of school belonging as a result of access to this curriculum.

The importance of early life touch for psychosocial and moral development

One of the primary means of communicating with a baby is through touch. Nurturing physical touch promotes healthy physiological development in social mammals, including humans. Physiology influences wellbeing and psychosocial functioning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections among early life positive and negative touch and wellbeing and sociomoral development. In study 1, mothers of preschoolers (n = 156) reported their attitudes toward positive/negative touch and on their children's wellbeing and sociomoral outcomes, illustrating moderate to strong positive correlations between positive touch attitudes and children's sociomoral capacities and orientations and negative correlations with psychopathology. In study 2, we used an existing longitudinal dataset, with at-risk mothers (n = 682) and their children to test touch effects on moral capacities and social behaviors in early life. Results demonstrated moderate to strong relationships between positive/negative touch and concurrent child behavioral regulation and positive correlations between low corporal punishment and child sociomoral outcomes. In a third study with adults (n = 607), we found significant mediation processes connecting retrospective reports of childhood touch to adult moral orientation through attachment security, mental health, and moral capacities. In general across studies, more affectionate touch and less punishing touch were positively associated with wellbeing and development of moral capacities and engaged moral orientation.

An explanation of apology acceptance based on lay peoples’ insights

Apologies play an important role in forgiveness, but the pathway from apology to forgiveness is unclear. Many researchers use Goffman’s model of the corrective interchange, or models derived from it to guide their research. This model is based on the assumption that offenders apologise to victims who accept these apologies and that this leads to forgiveness. The acceptance of the apology is therefore central in this model, so we undertook a systematic literature review to determine how researchers conceptualise and measure apology acceptance and found a lack of clarity around the construct. We addressed this theoretical uncertainty by exploring whether lay people distinguish between apology acceptance and forgiveness, and if they do, how they describe apology acceptance. We use contemporary neuro-cognitive theories that explain social and moral decision-making and behaviour to integrate the themes we identified to develop a preliminary theoretical explanation of how the apology acceptance stage fits into Goffman’s model.

An expanded model of the moral self: Beyond care and justice

Most research on moral identities conceptualizes morality exclusively in terms of care and justice, but work from across the social sciences indicates that these represent only a corner of the moral landscape. Emphasizing care and justice alone severely restricts the scope of moral identity models, and risks under-estimating the influence of moral self-processes. To address this, we develop and validate measures of moral identity focused on group loyalty, authority, and purity, three additional facets of morality highlighted in Moral Foundations Theory. Although the loyalty identity is remarkably similar to the care/justice identity, the authority and purity identities are distinct, and demonstrate adequate convergent, divergent, and nomological validity. These identities also predict a wide range of behaviors that traditional care/justice focused moral identities miss. Taken together, our work indicates that the moral self is more complex - and has a much wider scope of influence - than previously supposed.

Nurses’ perspectives on moral distress: A Q methodology approach

Background:

Moral distress occurs when nurses experience ethical dilemmas. Issues related to these dilemmas are addressed in some nursing education courses. Nurses’ reaction to dilemma such as moral distress is relatively less noticed.

Objective:

This study aimed to identify and describe the various types of perceptions of moral distress exhibited by nurses.

Research design:

This study applied Q methodology to explore the perspectives of nurses regarding moral distress. Data were collected in two stages. First, in-depth interviews were conducted to collect nurses’ opinions. Sentences that best fit the concepts of moral distress were extracted for the construction of Q statements. Second, nurses subjectively ranked these Q statements so that the relevant severity of moral distress could be determined using Q sorts. The study participants were nurses at a regional teaching hospital in northeast Taiwan. A total of 60 participants were invited to rank 40 moral distress Q statements.

Ethical considerations:

The study protocol was approved by the institutional review board of National Yang-Ming University Hospital. Only the participants who signed an informed consent form participated in the study. The respondents’ right to withdraw from the study was respected.

Findings:

Five types of responses were identified regarding the nurses’ perspectives. These types were “conflict with personal values,” “excessive of workload,” “curbing of autonomy,” “constraint engendered by organizational norms,” and “self-expectation frustration.”

Conclusion:

The findings regarding nurses’ experiences of moral distress can be used to construct multifaceted policies and solutions and to incorporate ethical education in training programs.

Morality and politics: Comparing alternate theories

Debates about the American "culture wars" have led scholars to develop several theories relating morality to political attitudes and behaviors. However, researchers have not adequately compared these theories, nor have they examined the overall contribution of morality to explaining political variation. This study uses nationally representative data to compare the utility of 19 moral constructs from four research traditions - associated with the work of Hunter, Lakoff, Haidt, and Schwartz - for predicting political orientation (liberalism/conservatism). Results indicate that morality explains a third of the variation in political orientation - more than basic demographic and religious predictors - but that no one theory provides a fully adequate explanation of this phenomenon. Instead, political orientation is best predicted by selected moral constructs that are unique to each of the four traditions, and by two moral constructs that crosscut them. Future work should investigate how these moral constructs can be synthesized to create a more comprehensive theory of morality and politics.

Changes in Adult Attachment Styles in American College Students Over Time

The current article examines changes over time in a commonly used measure of adult attachment style. A cross-temporal meta-analysis was conducted on 94 samples of American college students (total N = 25,243, between 1988 and 2011) who chose the most representative description of four possible attachment styles (Secure, Dismissing, Preoccupied, and Fearful) on the Relationship Questionnaire. The percentage of students with Secure attachment styles has decreased in recent years (1988: 48.98%; 2011: 41.62%), whereas the percentage of students with Insecure attachment styles (sum of Dismissing, Preoccupied, Fearful) has increased in recent years (1988: 51.02%; 2011: 58.38%). The percentage of students with Dismissing attachment styles has increased over time (1988: 11.93%; 2011: 18.62%), even after controlling for age, gender, race, and publication status. Positive views of others have declined across the same time period. We discuss possible implications and explanations for these changes.

The emotional foundations of high moral intelligence

Moral intelligence is grounded in emotion and reason. Neuroscientific and clinical research illustrate how early life co-regulation with caregivers influences emotion, cognition, and moral character. Triune ethics theory (Narvaez, 2008) integrates neuroscientific, evolutionary, and developmental findings to explain differences in moral functioning, identifying security, engagement, and imagination ethics that can be dispositionally fostered by experience during sensitive periods, but also situationally triggered. Mature moral functioning relies on the integration of emotion, intuition, and reasoning, which come together in adaptive ethical expertise. Moral expertise can be cultivated in organizations using the integrative ethical education model.

The contribution of emotion and cognition to moral sensitivity: a neurodevelopmental study

Whether emotion is a source of moral judgments remains controversial. This study combined neurophysiological measures, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye-tracking, and pupillary response with behavioral measures assessing affective and moral judgments across age. One hundred and twenty-six participants aged between 4 and 37 years viewed scenarios depicting intentional versus accidental actions that caused harm/damage to people and objects. Morally, salient scenarios evoked stronger empathic sadness in young participants and were associated with enhanced activity in the amygdala, insula, and temporal poles. While intentional harm was evaluated as equally wrong across all participants, ratings of deserved punishments and malevolent intent gradually became more differentiated with age. Furthermore, age-related increase in activity was detected in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in response to intentional harm to people, as well as increased functional connectivity between this region and the amygdala. Our study provides evidence that moral reasoning involves a complex integration between affective and cognitive processes that gradually changes with age and can be viewed in dynamic transaction across the course of ontogenesis. The findings support the view that negative emotion alerts the individual to the moral salience of a situation by bringing discomfort and thus can serve as an antecedent to moral judgment.

The world looks small when you only look through a telescope: The need for a broad and developmental study of reasoning

If the target article represents the summary findings of the field, reasoning research is deeply flawed. The vision is too narrow and seems to fall into biological determinism. Humans use reasoning in effective ways apparently not studied by researchers, such as reasoning for action. Moreover, as the brain develops through adulthood and from experience so do reasoning capabilities.

Moral Complexity

Recently, intuitionist theories have been effective in capturing the academic discourse about morality. Intuitionist theories, like rationalist theories, offer important but only partial understanding of moral functioning. Both can be fallacious and succumb to truthiness: the attachment to one’s opinions because they “feel right,” potentially leading to harmful action or inaction. Both intuition and reasoning are involved in deliberation and expertise. Both are malleable from environmental and educational influence, making questions of normativity—which intuitions and reasoning skills to foster—of utmost importance. Good intuition and reasoning inform mature moral functioning, which needs to include capacities that promote sustainable human well-being. Individual capacities for habituated empathic concern and moral metacognition—moral locus of control, moral self-regulation, and moral self-reflection—comprise mature moral functioning, which also requires collective capacities for moral dialogue and moral institutions. These capacities underlie moral innovation and are necessary for solving the complex challenges humanity faces.