The role of emotion in moral psychology

Do contemplative practices make us more moral?

Contemplative practices are a staple of modern life and have historically been intertwined with morality. However, do these practices in fact improve our morality? The answer remains unclear because the science of contemplative practices has focused on unidimensional aspects of morality, which do not align with the type of interdependent moral functioning these practices aspire to cultivate. Here, we appeal to a multifactor construct, which allows the assessment of outcomes from a contemplative intervention across multiple dimensions of moral cognition and behavior. This offers an open-minded and empirically rigorous investigation into the impact of contemplative practices on moral actions. Using this framework, we gain insight into the effect of mindfulness meditation on morality, which we show does indeed have positive influences, but also some negative influences, distributed across our moral functioning.

Towards machine learning for moral choice analysis in health economics: A literature review and research agenda

BACKGROUND

Discrete choice models (DCMs) for moral choice analysis will likely lead to erroneous model outcomes and misguided policy recommendations, as only some characteristics of moral decision-making are considered. Machine learning (ML) is recently gaining interest in the field of discrete choice modelling. This paper explores the potential of combining DCMs and ML to study moral decision-making more accurately and better inform policy decisions in healthcare.

METHODS

An interdisciplinary literature search across four databases - PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Arxiv - was conducted to gather papers. Based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guideline, studies were screened for eligibility on inclusion criteria and extracted attributes from eligible papers. Of the 6285 articles, we included 277 studies.

RESULTS

DCMs have shortcomings in studying moral decision-making. Whilst the DCMs' mathematical elegance and behavioural appeal hold clear interpretations, the models do not account for the 'moral' cost and benefit in an individual's utility calculation. The literature showed that ML obtains higher predictive power, model flexibility, and ability to handle large and unstructured datasets. Combining the strengths of ML methods with DCMs has the potential for studying moral decision-making.

CONCLUSIONS

By providing a research agenda, this paper highlights that ML has clear potential to i) find and deepen the utility specification of DCMs, and ii) enrich the insights extracted from DCMs by considering the intrapersonal determinants of moral decision-making.

Empathic concern induction modulates behavioral ratings and neural responses to harm-related moral judgment: An event-related potentials study

Although empathic concern is critical in harm-related moral judgment, the temporal dynamics underlying the impact of empathic concern on moral judgment remain unclear. This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how empathic concern induction shaped the way individuals perceive harmful/helpful behaviors. Behavioral results showed that participants assigned more blame to harmful behaviors in the empathic concern priming condition compared to those in the control condition. ERP results showed that helpful behaviors elicited larger N1 than did harmful behaviors. Additionally, harmful behaviors in the empathic concern priming condition elicited more negative N2 than did harmful behaviors in the control condition. Moreover, harmful behaviors elicited larger late positive potential (LPP) than did helpful behaviors in the control condition. These findings suggest that (1) empathic concern induction might increase moral sensitivity about harm-related norms; (2) participants independent of the empathic concern manipulation can distinguish between harmful behaviors and helpful behaviors similarly, as indicated by the early ERP component (N1); (3) empathic concern especially influences the intermediate (N2) and later (LPP) ERP components.

The role of emotional awareness in evaluative judgment: evidence from alexithymia

Evaluative judgments imply positive or negative regard. But there are different ways in which something can be positive or negative. How do we tell them apart? According to Evaluative Sentimentalism, different evaluations (e.g., dangerousness vs. offensiveness) are grounded on different emotions (e.g., fear vs. anger). If this is the case, evaluation differentiation requires emotional awareness. Here, we test this hypothesis by looking at alexithymia, a deficit in emotional awareness consisting of problems identifying, describing, and thinking about emotions. The results of Study 1 suggest that high alexithymia is not only related to problems distinguishing emotions, but also to problems distinguishing evaluations. Study 2 replicated this latter effect after controlling for individual differences in attentional impulsiveness and reflective reasoning, and found that reasoning makes an independent contribution to evaluation differentiation. These results suggest that emotional sensibilities play an irreducible role in evaluative judgment while affording a role for reasoning.

Amygdala connectivity and aggression

Neurobiological models propose that reactive aggression is predicated on impairments in amygdala-prefrontal connectivity that subserves moral decision-making and emotion regulation. The amygdala is a key component within this neural network that modulates reactive aggression. We provide a review of amygdala dysfunctional brain networks leading to reactive aggressive behavior. We elaborate on key concepts, focusing on moral decision-making and emotion regulation in a developmental context, and brain network connectivity factors relating to amygdala (dys)function-factors which we suggest predispose to reactive aggression. We additionally discuss insights into the latest treatment interventions, providing the utilization of the scientific findings for practice.

Men's reactions to gender inequality in the workplace: From relative deprivation on behalf of women to collective action

Over recent years, the role of men as women's allies in the struggle for gender equality has become increasingly important. Previous research has shown that often men do not fight gender inequalities as they fail to recognize the severity of discrimination against women (e.g., in hiring). In this study (N = 427), we examined whether men who experienced relative deprivation on behalf of women-a form of relative deprivation that stems from the awareness that women hold a less privileged position in society-were more motivated to engage in collective action to support gender equality in the workplace. The findings showed that men's feelings of deprivation on behalf of women were associated with a greater willingness to engage in collective action for gender equality. This relationship was sequentially mediated by two emotional reactions related to deprivation-increased guilt about gender inequalities and decreased fear of a potential backlash-and the moral conviction of acting for gender equality. These results suggest that men's awareness of gender inequality at work is an important antecedent to their acting in solidarity with women and that emotions and moral conviction are two psychological processes that turn cognition into behavior. Action to reduce gender inequalities should make men more sensitive to seeing that they hold a privileged position in society and to recognizing the pervasive and harmful nature of women's deprivation.

Relationship between Moral Values for Driving Behavior and Brain Activity: An NIRS Study

Although there are clear moral components to traffic violations and risky and aggressive driving behavior, few studies have examined the relationship between moral values and risky driving. This study aimed to examine the relationship between moral views of driving behavior and brain activity. Twenty healthy drivers participated in this study. A questionnaire regarding their moral values concerning driving behavior was administered to the participants. Brain activity was measured using near-infrared spectroscopy while eliciting moral emotions. Based on the results of the questionnaire, the participants were divided into two groups: one with high moral values and the other with low moral values. Brain activity was statistically compared between the two groups. Both groups had significantly lower activity in the prefrontal cortex during the self-risky driving task. The low moral group had significantly lower activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex than the high moral group, while it had lower activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the self-risky driving task than in the safe driving task. Regardless of their moral values, the participants were less susceptible to moral emotions during risky driving. Furthermore, our findings suggest that drivers with lower moral values may be even less susceptible to moral emotions.

Effects of Core Disgust and Moral Disgust on Moral Judgment: An Event-Related Potential Study

Core disgust is elicited by physical or chemical stimuli, while moral disgust is evoked by abstract violations of moral norms. Although previous studies have pointed out these two types of disgust can affect behavior and spatial dimensions of moral judgment, less is known about how moral and core disgust affect the temporal neural processing of moral judgment. In addition, whether moral and core disgust are only related to purity-based moral judgment or all kinds of moral judgment is still controversial. This study aimed to explore how core and moral disgust affect the neural processing of purity-based moral judgment by using affective priming and moral judgment tasks. The behavioral results showed that the severity of moral violation of non-purity ones is higher than purity ones. The event-related potentials (ERP) results mainly revealed that earlier P2 and N2 components, which represent the automatic moral processes, can differentiate neutral and two types of disgust rather than differentiating moral domain, while the later N450, frontal, and parietal LPP components, which represent the conflict detection and, later, cognitive processing can differentiate the purity and non-purity ones rather than differentiating priming type. Moreover, core and moral disgust priming mainly differed in the purity-based moral processing indexed by parietal LPP. Our findings confirmed that the disgusting effect on moral judgments can be explained within the framework of dual-process and social intuitionist models, suggesting that emotions, including core and moral disgust, played an essential role in the automatic intuition process. The later parietal LPP results strongly supported that core disgust only affected the purity-based moral judgment, fitting the primary purity hypothesis well. We show how these theories can provide novel insights into the temporal mechanisms of moral judgment.

Effective Connectivity and Criminal Sentencing Decisions: Dynamic Causal Models in Laypersons and Legal Experts

This magnetic resonance imaging study is designed to obtain relevant implications for criminal justice and explores the effective connectivity underlying expertise. Laypersons and experts considered sentences for remorseful and remorseless defendants, respectively, with and without mitigation, in hypothetical murder cases. Two groups revealed no differential activation. However, dynamic causal modeling analysis found distinct patterns of connectivity associated with subjects’ expertise and mitigating factors. In sentencing for remorseful defendants, laypersons showed increased strength in all bidirectional connections among activated regions of Brodmann area (BA) 32, BA23, the right posterior insula, and the precuneus. In contrast, legal experts sentenced based on mitigation reasoning, showed increased strength only in the bidirectional connection between the insula and the precuneus. When sentencing for remorseless ones without mitigation, both laypersons and experts increased the connection strength, but with reverse directionality, between regions; legal experts strengthened connectivity from BA10 to other regions, that is, the right anterior insula and BA23, but the directionality was reversed in laypersons. In addition, the strength of connection to BA32 and BA10 was correlated with changes in punishments by mitigating factors. This is a crucial result that establishes the validity of the connectivity estimates, which were uninformed by the independent (behavioral) differences in the severity of punishment.

Moral Judgment as Categorization (MJAC)

Observed variability and complexity of judgments of "right" and "wrong" cannot be readily accounted for within extant approaches to understanding moral judgment. In response to this challenge, we present a novel perspective on categorization in moral judgment. Moral judgment as categorization (MJAC) incorporates principles of category formation research while addressing key challenges of existing approaches to moral judgment. People develop skills in making context-relevant categorizations. They learn that various objects (events, behaviors, people, etc.) can be categorized as morally right or wrong. Repetition and rehearsal result in reliable, habitualized categorizations. According to this skill-formation account of moral categorization, the learning and the habitualization of the forming of moral categories occur within goal-directed activity that is sensitive to various contextual influences. By allowing for the complexity of moral judgments, MJAC offers greater explanatory power than existing approaches while also providing opportunities for a diverse range of new research questions.

Temporal dynamics of explicit and implicit moral evaluations

Explicit moral evaluation is often accompanied with active attention and explicit responses to moral information, while implicit moral evaluation happens in passive attention and implicit response to moral information. Previous studies have pointed out the differences in the neural mechanisms underlying explicit and implicit moral processing on the spatial dimension, however, the temporal differences between these two processes have not been clear. This study aimed at comparing the temporal dynamics between explicit and implicit moral evaluation of harm/care-related moral scenarios with high/low emotional arousal by using event-related potentials (ERP) technique. The behavioral results showed that the accuracy of the explicit task is higher than that of the implicit task, especially for high-arousal moral actions. The ERP results mainly revealed that regardless of the task type, the brain responses to moral evaluations can be divided into early emotional arousal processing indexed by the frontal N1, moral intuition indexed by the frontal N2, and middle/late stages of processing integration of emotional arousal and moral cognition which involve elaborative processing and cognitive control, reflected by the frontal P2, parietal P3, parietal LPP, and FSW. Moreover, explicit and implicit moral evaluations mainly differed in the late stage of moral processing indexed by the P3, LPP and FSW. Our findings provide robust evidence for the "hybrid" model supposed by Huebner, which suggested that both explicit and implicit moral evaluations involved a complex interaction between emotional processes and moral cognition, and the later ERP results strongly supported that explicit and implicit moral evaluations represented two relatively independent processes, fitting the multinomial model supposed by Cameron.

Universality and Cultural Diversity in Moral Reasoning and Judgment

Many theories have shaped the concept of morality and its development by anchoring it in the realm of the social systems and values of each culture. This review discusses the current formulation of moral theories that attempt to explain cultural factors affecting moral judgment and reasoning. It aims to survey key criticisms that emerged in the past decades. In both cases, we highlight examples of cultural differences in morality, to show that there are cultural patterns of moral cognition in Westerners' individualistic culture and Easterners' collectivist culture. It suggests a paradigmatic change in this field by proposing pluralist "moralities" thought to be universal and rooted in the human evolutionary past. Notwithstanding, cultures vary substantially in their promotion and transmission of a multitude of moral reasonings and judgments. Depending on history, religious beliefs, social ecology, and institutional regulations (e.g., kinship structure and economic markets), each society develops a moral system emphasizing several moral orientations. This variability raises questions for normative theories of morality from a cross-cultural perspective. Consequently, we shed light on future descriptive work on morality to identify the cultural characteristics likely to impact the expression or development of reasoning, justification, argumentation, and moral judgment in Westerners' individualistic culture and Easterners' collectivist culture.

Spacious Environments Make Us Tolerant-The Role of Emotion and Metaphor

The physical environment plays an important role in moral cognition. Previous research has demonstrated that the physical environment affects individual moral judgment. Investigators have argued that the environment influences moral judgment through emotion and cognition, such as during metaphor processing. Following the intensification of urbanization and increases in population size, the phenomenon of a narrow environment has become more common. However, the relation between environmental spaciousness and moral judgment has not been thoroughly examined. We examined the effect of environmental spaciousness (spaciousness vs. narrowness) on moral judgments in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Results showed that participants report a higher rating score of moral judgment in more spacious environments compared with narrow environments. We further explored the roles of emotion and metaphor in the relation between environmental spaciousness and moral judgments. We found support for a partial mediation effect of emotion in the relationship between environmental spaciousness and moral judgment. The results also supported an association between the concept of spaciousness and tolerant cognition. Spacious environments may elicit positive emotions and more tolerant cognition, which in turn influences moral judgment. These results provide new evidence for the influence of the environment on moral judgments, and more attention may be warranted to incorporate this relationship in environmental design.

Gross values: Investigating the role of disgust in bioethics

What is the role of disgust in moral judgements? Previous research found that disgust increases the severity of judgments; but other more recent work has cast doubt on these findings. Here we investigate roles of induced and trait disgust on moral judgments of controversial biological and medical technologies – bioethics – an area rife with proto-typical disgust cues. Participants (N = 600) viewed disgusting, frightening, or neutral pictures, rated the moral acceptability of biotechnologies, and completed questionnaire measures of trait disgust. We found a small negative effect of induced disgust (but not fear) on the acceptability of ‘existing’ biotechnology, but not ‘future’, ‘agricultural’, or ‘termination’ biotechnologies. But this effect was too small to change pre-existing opinions and would not have survived a correction for multiple tests. Although trait disgust had mostly negative relationships with the moral acceptability of biotechnologies, it did not moderate the effect of observing disgusting photos on biotechnology judgments. The larger, more consistent effects for trait disgust suggest that either (a) measures of trait disgust and moral attitudes share a source of method variance or (b) incidental, visual manipulations are too weak to capture the true effect of disgust on moral judgments.

Policy considerations to achieve practical ethics: closing the gap between ethical theory and practic

Social and professional behaviors are driven by extrinsic as well as intrinsic factors including executive rules and regulations enacted by extrinsic agents through coercion, police force and penalties. Despite their effectiveness, these mechanisms undermine the fact that ethics is an intrinsic human quality. The present study seeks strategies to apply extrinsic coercion as an incentive to direct ethics as an intrinsic value. Ethical behaviors driven by intrinsic motivations are more permanent and less costly. Legal force can either strengthen or weaken intrinsic requirements. Extrinsic conditions such as considering the interests, attitudes and preferences of others, involving people in the regulation and execution of law, justification of law, avoiding excessive punishment or rewards, and indirect support of ethics by establishing the appropriate social context can help boost intrinsic requirements in individuals. Ethics will not be practically established unless we harness individuals' 'willingness to act' as an essential determinant for ethical behavior. This requires adoption of a more psychological approach to ethics. If this aspect of ethical behavior is considered in regulations and executive processes, extrinsic forces can strengthen intrinsic requirements and spread ethics.

Attentional efficiency does not explain the mental state × domain effect

The reduced importance of intent when judging purity (vs. harm) violations is some of the strongest evidence for distinct moral modules or systems: moral pluralism. However, research has indicated that some supposed differences between purity and harm moral domains are due to the relative weirdness of purity vignettes. This weirdness might lead to a failure to attend to or correctly process relevant mental state information. Such attentional failures could offer an alternative explanation (to separate moral systems) for the reduced exculpatory value of innocent intentions for purity violations. We tested if the different role of intent in each domain was moderated by individual differences in attentional efficiency, as measured by the Attention Network Task. If attentional efficiency explains the reduced exculpatory value of innocent intentions in purity (vs. harm) violations, then we would expect those high (vs. low) in attentional efficiency not to show the reduced exculpatory effect of innocent intentions in the purity (vs. harm) domain. Consistent with moral pluralism, results revealed no such moderation. Findings are discussed in relation to various ways of testing domain-general and domain-specific accounts of the mental state × domain effect, so that we might better understand the architecture of our moral minds.

Replicating different roles of intent across moral domains

Whether moral cognition is underpinned by distinct mental systems that process different domains of moral information (moral pluralism) is an important question for moral cognition research. The reduced importance of intent (intentional versus accidental action) when judging purity (e.g. incest), when compared with harm (e.g. poisoning), moral violations is, arguably, some of the strongest experimental evidence for distinct moral systems or 'foundations'. The experiment presented here is a replication attempt of these experimental findings. A pre-registered replication of Experiment 1B from the original article documenting this effect was conducted in a sample of N = 400 participants. Findings from this successful replication are discussed in terms of theoretical and methodological implications for approaches to moral cognition.

Folk beliefs about the relationships anger and disgust have with moral disapproval

Theories that view emotions as being related in some way to moral judgments suggest that condemning moral emotions should, at a minimum, be understood by laypeople to coincide with judgments of moral disapproval. Seven studies (total N = 826) tested the extent to which anger and disgust align with this criterion. We observed that while anger is understood to be strongly related to moral disapproval of people's actions and character, disgust is not (Studies 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, and 3), and that, in contexts where disgust expressions are thought to coincide somewhat with moral disapproval, part of the reason is that the expression is perceived as anger (Study 4). Expressions of sadness are also construed as communicating anger in such contexts (Study 5). We discuss our findings in terms of rethinking how we should consider disgust as a moral emotion.

Oxytocin amplifies the influence of good intentions on social judgments

Studies have shown that the evolutionarily conserved neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) promotes various prosocial behaviors, yet there are few studies of the effect of OT on social judgments, especially on judgments when the actor's intention and the final outcome are incongruent. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment, participants were asked to play the role of the recipient in a dictator game and to make social judgments about the dictator after intranasal OT administration. To isolate the outcome and the intention of the dictator's allocation, we developed a novel social judgment task in which recipients were told that 50% of the dictators' proposals would be reversed. The results showed that the effect of OT on social judgment was modulated by intention: OT increased goodness ratings only towards dictators with hyperfair intention. Our findings support the affiliative-motivation theory which states that OT enhances the affiliative motivation and recognition of positive-valence social stimuli.

The role of emotion regulation in moral judgment

Moral judgment has typically been characterized as a conflict between emotion and reason. In recent years, a central concern has been determining which process is the chief contributor to moral behavior. While classic moral theorists claimed that moral evaluations stem from consciously controlled cognitive processes, recent research indicates that affective processes may be driving moral behavior. Here, we propose a new way of thinking about emotion within the context of moral judgment, one in which affect is generated and transformed by both automatic and controlled processes, and moral evaluations are shifted accordingly. We begin with a review of how existing theories in psychology and neuroscience address the interaction between emotion and cognition, and how these theories may inform the study of moral judgment. We then describe how brain regions involved in both affective processing and moral judgment overlap and may make distinct contributions to the moral evaluation process. Finally, we discuss how this way of thinking about emotion can be reconciled with current theories in moral psychology before mapping out future directions in the study of moral behavior.

Deciphering moral intuition: How agents, deeds, and consequences influence moral judgment

Moral evaluations occur quickly following heuristic-like intuitive processes without effortful deliberation. There are several competing explanations for this. The ADC-model predicts that moral judgment consists in concurrent evaluations of three different intuitive components: the character of a person (Agent-component, A); their actions (Deed-component, D); and the consequences brought about in the situation (Consequences-component, C). Thereby, it explains the intuitive appeal of precepts from three dominant moral theories (virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism), and flexible yet stable nature of moral judgment. Insistence on single-component explanations has led to many centuries of debate as to which moral precepts and theories best describe (or should guide) moral evaluation. This study consists of two large-scale experiments and provides a first empirical investigation of predictions yielded by the ADC model. We use vignettes describing different moral situations in which all components of the model are varied simultaneously. Experiment 1 (within-subject design) shows that positive descriptions of the A-, D-, and C-components of moral intuition lead to more positive moral judgments in a situation with low-stakes. Also, interaction effects between the components were discovered. Experiment 2 further investigates these results in a between-subject design. We found that the effects of the A-, D-, and C-components vary in strength in a high-stakes situation. Moreover, sex, age, education, and social status had no effects. However, preferences for precepts in certain moral theories (PPIMT) partially moderated the effects of the A- and C-component. Future research on moral intuitions should consider the simultaneous three-component constitution of moral judgment.

Deontological morality can be experimentally enhanced by increasing disgust: A transcranial direct current stimulation study

Previous studies empirically support the existence of a distinctive association between deontological (but not altruistic) guilt and both disgust and obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms. Given that the neural substrate underlying deontological guilt comprises brain regions strictly implicated in the emotion of disgust (i.e. the insula), the present study aimed to test the hypothesis that indirect stimulation of the insula via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) would enhance disgust and morality in the deontological domain. A randomized, sham-controlled, within-subject design was used. Thirty-seven healthy individuals (25 women) underwent 15-min anodal and sham tDCS over T3 in two different days, while their heart rate (HR) was recorded to derive measures of parasympathetic nervous system activity (HR variability; HRV). After the first 10-min of sham or active tDCS stimulation, participants were asked to 1) complete a series of 6-item words that could be completed with either a disgust-related word (cleaning/dirtiness) or neutral alternatives; 2) rate how much a series of vignettes, each depicting a behavior that violated a specific moral foundation, were morally wrong. Levels of trait anxiety, depression, disgust sensitivity, scrupulosity, and altruism as well as pre- and post- stimulation momentary emotional states were assessed. Compared to the sham condition, after active stimulation of T3 a) HRV significantly increased and participants b) completed more words in terms of cleaning/dirtiness and c) reported greater subjective levels of disgust, all suggesting the elicitation of the emotion of disgust. Although the results are only marginally significant, they point to the absence of difference between the two experimental conditions for moral vignettes in the altruistic domain (i.e., animal care, emotional and physical human care), but not in the deontological domain (i.e., authority, fairness, liberty, and sacrality), where vignettes were judged as more morally wrong in the active compared to the sham condition. Moreover, scores on the OCI-R correlated with how much vignettes were evaluated as morally wrong in the deontological domain only. Results preliminarily support the association between disgust and morality in the deontological domain, with important implications for OC disorder (OCD). Future studies should explore the possibility of decreasing both disgust and morality in patients with OCD by the use of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques.

The past thirty years of emotion research: appraisal and beyond

For this Special Issue, I highlight the past and present importance of appraisal theory as well as the challenges to its status as a total theory of emotions from the other functions of emotions: associative learning, self-regulation and social communication. This theoretical view applies both to emotion research in general and the specific fields of my interest in the emotions of moral judgment and intergroup processes. Methodologically, developments in analyses of large and more naturally occurring data sets will give an opportunity to square psychology's structural models of discrete emotions with the more complicated reality that exists. Both for the field and for individual researchers picking up the study of emotions, my advice is to pay special attention to measures, their assumptions and their context.

Are Moral and Socio-conventional Knowledge Impaired in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury?

Objective

The aim of this study was to investigate explicit moral and socio-conventional knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) patients.

Method

A group of 28 TBI patients was tested on a new set of moral and socio-conventional items. Responses of TBI patients were compared with those of 28 matched controls. Participants had to report how hard would be to perform specific moral or socio-conventional transgressions, using a 10-point Likert scale. We analyzed our data through mixed-effects models, to jointly assess by-participants and by-items variance. The factors considered were Type of Item (Moral vs. Socio-conventional) and Group (TBI vs. Controls).

Results

Results revealed a significant interaction between Type of Item and Group (χ2[1] = 25.5, p < .001). Simple-effects analyses showed that TBI, as Controls, were able to differentiate moral and socio-conventional transgressions (χ2[1] = 72.3, p < .001), as they deemed the former as more difficult to enact. TBI patients, however, evaluated moral transgressions as easier to fulfill (χ2[1] = 12.2, p = .001).

Conclusions

TBI patients can clearly differentiate moral and socio-conventional transgressions, suggesting that the explicit knowledge of these two dimensions is spared. TBI patients, however, considered moral transgressions as easier to fulfill with respect to Controls. This finding may suggest a tendency in TBI patients to underestimate the weight of moral transgressions.

How Can Prosocial Behavior Be Motivated? The Different Roles of Moral Judgment, Moral Elevation, and Moral Identity Among the Young Chinese

Prior research has shown that moral judgment, moral elevation, and moral identity contribute to prosocial behavior. However, how these three motivating factors interact in predicting prosocial behaviors is not yet clear. The current study proposed and examined a moderated mediation model to illustrate the specific process of how prosocial behavior is motivated by these factors. A total of 264 Chinese undergraduate and graduate students participated in the present study (140 females; age range 17–26, M = 20.25, SD = 1.57). Moral judgment competence, intensity of moral elevation, and moral identity were measured by self-reported scales, and the tendency to engage in prosocial behavior was assessed in a simulated “Ask for help” situation. The multiple regressive results showed that moral elevation mediated the effect of moral judgment on prosocial behavior, and moral identity moderated this mediation through interacting with moral elevation. However, within the proposed model, the mediating effect of moral elevation was stronger in women than in men, while the moderating role of moral identity appeared only in women. These findings imply different methods for men and women to enhance their prosocial behaviors, including the need to pay more attention to developing moral reasoning in men while putting more emphasis on evoking moral emotion and moral traits in women. Together, these results supported the assumptive model and provided a comprehensive framework to explain prosocial behaviors.

Neural correlates of conventional and harm/welfare-based moral decision-making

The degree to which social norms are processed by a unitary system or dissociable systems remains debated. Much research on children's social-cognitive judgments has supported the distinction between "moral" (harm/welfare-based) and "conventional" norms. However, the extent to which these norms are processed by dissociable neural systems remains unclear. To address this issue, 23 healthy participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they rated the wrongness of harm/welfare-based and conventional transgressions and neutral vignettes. Activation significantly greater than the neutral vignette baseline was observed in regions implicated in decision-making regions including rostral/ventral medial frontal, anterior insula and dorsomedial frontal cortices when evaluating both harm/welfare-based and social-conventional transgressions. Greater activation when rating harm/welfare-based relative to social-conventional transgressions was seen through much of ACC and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. Greater activation was observed in superior temporal gyrus, bilateral middle temporal gyrus, left PCC, and temporal-parietal junction when rating social-conventional transgressions relative to harm/welfare-based transgressions. These data suggest that decisions regarding the wrongness of actions, irrespective of whether they involve care/harm-based or conventional transgressions, recruit regions generally implicated in affect-based decision-making. However, there is neural differentiation between harm/welfare-based and conventional transgressions. This may reflect the particular importance of processing the intent of transgressors of conventional norms and perhaps the greater emotional content or salience of harm/welfare-based transgressions.

On Disease and Deontology: Multiple Tests of the Influence of Disease Threat on Moral Vigilance

Threat has been linked to certain facets of moral cognition, but the specific implications of disease threat for moral judgment remain poorly understood. Across three studies, we investigated the role of perceived disease threat in shaping moral judgment and hypothesized that perceived disease threat would cause people to be more sensitive to moral violations (or more “morally vigilant”). All three studies found a positive relationship between dispositional worry about disease transmission and moral vigilance. Additional analyses suggested that this worry was more strongly related to vigilance toward binding moral foundations. Study 3 demonstrated that moral vigilance was higher in individuals for whom the threat of disease was experimentally made salient, relative to individuals in both a neutral and a nondisease threat condition. Taken together, these results suggest that perceived disease threat may influence people’s moral vigilance across moral domains.

Using Virtual Reality to Assess Ethical Decisions in Road Traffic Scenarios: Applicability of Value-of-Life-Based Models and Influences of Time Pressure

Self-driving cars are posing a new challenge to our ethics. By using algorithms to make decisions in situations where harming humans is possible, probable, or even unavoidable, a self-driving car's ethical behavior comes pre-defined. Ad hoc decisions are made in milliseconds, but can be based on extensive research and debates. The same algorithms are also likely to be used in millions of cars at a time, increasing the impact of any inherent biases, and increasing the importance of getting it right. Previous research has shown that moral judgment and behavior are highly context-dependent, and comprehensive and nuanced models of the underlying cognitive processes are out of reach to date. Models of ethics for self-driving cars should thus aim to match human decisions made in the same context. We employed immersive virtual reality to assess ethical behavior in simulated road traffic scenarios, and used the collected data to train and evaluate a range of decision models. In the study, participants controlled a virtual car and had to choose which of two given obstacles they would sacrifice in order to spare the other. We randomly sampled obstacles from a variety of inanimate objects, animals and humans. Our model comparison shows that simple models based on one-dimensional value-of-life scales are suited to describe human ethical behavior in these situations. Furthermore, we examined the influence of severe time pressure on the decision-making process. We found that it decreases consistency in the decision patterns, thus providing an argument for algorithmic decision-making in road traffic. This study demonstrates the suitability of virtual reality for the assessment of ethical behavior in humans, delivering consistent results across subjects, while closely matching the experimental settings to the real world scenarios in question.

Empathy and moral emotions in post-apartheid South Africa: an fMRI investigation

Moral emotions elicited in response to others' suffering are mediated by empathy and affect how we respond to their pain. South Africa provides a unique opportunity to study group processes given its racially divided past. The present study seeks insights into aspects of the moral brain by investigating behavioral and functional MRI responses of White and Black South Africans who lived through apartheid to in- and out-group physical and social pain. Whereas the physical pain task featured faces expressing dynamic suffering, the social pain task featured victims of apartheid violence from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to elicit heartfelt emotion. Black participants' behavioral responses were suggestive of in-group favoritism, whereas White participants' responses were apparently egalitarian. However, all participants showed significant in-group biases in activation in the amygdala (physical pain), as well as areas involved in mental state representation, including the precuneus, temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and frontal pole (physical and social pain). Additionally, Black participants reacted with heightened moral indignation to own-race suffering, whereas White participants reacted with heightened shame to Black suffering, which was associated with blunted neural empathic responding. These findings provide ecologically valid insights into some behavioral and brain processes involved in complex moral situations.

Age-Related Differences in Contribution of Rule-Based Thinking toward Moral Evaluations

This study aims to investigate the interplay of different criteria of moral evaluation, related to the type of the rule and context characteristics, in moral reasoning of children, early, and late adolescents. Students attending to fourth, seventh, and tenth grade were asked to evaluate the acceptability of rule breaking actions using ad hoc scenarios. Results suggest that the role of different moral evaluation criteria changes by age. During adolescence a greater integration of the moral criteria emerged. Moreover, adolescents also prioritized the evaluation of moral rule (forbidding to harm others) violations as non-acceptable when the perpetrator harms an innocent victim by applying a direct personal force. The relevance of these findings to increase the understanding of how moral reasoning changes by age for the assessment of impairments in moral reasoning of non-normative groups is also discussed.

Interpersonal harm aversion as a necessary foundation for morality: A developmental neuroscience perspective

Growing evidence from developmental psychology and social neuroscience emphasizes the importance of third-party harm aversion for constructing morality. A sensitivity to interpersonal harm emerges very early in ontogeny, as reflected in both the capacity for implicit social evaluation and an aversion for antisocial agents. Yet it does not necessarily entail avoidance toward inflicting pain to others. Later, an understanding that harmful actions cause suffering emerges, followed by an integration of rules that can depend on social contexts and cultures. These developmental findings build on a burgeoning literature, which suggests that the fundamental nature of moral and social cognition, including their motivational and hedonic value, lies in general computational processes such as attention, approach-avoidance, social valuation, and decision making rather than in fully distinct, dedicated neural regions for morality. Bridging the gap between cognition and behaviors and the requisite affective, motivational, and cognitive mechanisms, a developmental neuroscience approach enriches our understanding of the emergence of morality.

Move me, astonish me… delight my eyes and brain: The Vienna Integrated Model of top-down and bottom-up processes in Art Perception (VIMAP) and corresponding affective, evaluative, and neurophysiological correlates

This paper has a rather audacious purpose: to present a comprehensive theory explaining, and further providing hypotheses for the empirical study of, the multiple ways by which people respond to art. Despite common agreement that interaction with art can be based on a compelling, and occasionally profound, psychological experience, the nature of these interactions is still under debate. We propose a model, The Vienna Integrated Model of Art Perception (VIMAP), with the goal of resolving the multifarious processes that can occur when we perceive and interact with visual art. Specifically, we focus on the need to integrate bottom-up, artwork-derived processes, which have formed the bulk of previous theoretical and empirical assessments, with top-down mechanisms which can describe how individuals adapt or change within their processing experience, and thus how individuals may come to particularly moving, disturbing, transformative, as well as mundane, results. This is achieved by combining several recent lines of theoretical research into a new integrated approach built around three processing checks, which we argue can be used to systematically delineate the possible outcomes in art experience. We also connect our model's processing stages to specific hypotheses for emotional, evaluative, and physiological factors, and address main topics in psychological aesthetics including provocative reactions-chills, awe, thrills, sublime-and difference between "aesthetic" and "everyday" emotional response. Finally, we take the needed step of connecting stages to functional regions in the brain, as well as broader core networks that may coincide with the proposed cognitive checks, and which taken together can serve as a basis for future empirical and theoretical art research.

Representations of moral violations: Category members and associated features

I present a novel way to conceptualize Turiel and colleagues’ Social Domain Theory (SDT), and Haidt and colleagues’ Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), as theories of how concepts of moral violations are mentally represented. I argue that SDT is best viewed as a theory of the features that are associated with concepts of moral violations, including wrongness, generalizability across cultures, and intrinsic harmfulness, and that MFT, in contrast, is best viewed as a theory of individual differences in what kinds of acts are categorized as moral violations (i.e., of category membership). This perspective generates a novel prediction: the same individual difference variables that predict variation in moral values according to MFT should predict ascription of the features predicted by SDT. That is, judgments of wrongness, generalizability, and intrinsic harmfulness should covary with the same predictors as do endorsed moral values, specifically, political orientation and analytic thinking. Three studies supported this hypothesis.

Testosterone administration in females modulates moral judgment and patterns of brain activation and functional connectivity

Morality is defined as prescriptive norms regarding how people should treat one another, and includes concepts of fairness, justice, and rights. One recent study with moral dilemmas suggested that testosterone administration increases utilitarian judgments, which depends on second-to-fourth (2D: 4D) digit ratio, as a proxy of prenatal priming. However, the neural mechanism by which acute testosterone modulates moral reasoning remains to be determined. Using a placebo-controlled within-subject design, the current study examined the neuromodulatory effect of testosterone in young females by combining moral dilemmas, 2D: 4D, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and subjective ratings of morally laden scenarios. Results showed that testosterone administration elicited more utilitarian responses to evitable dilemmas. The high 2D: 4D group scored more punishments for moral evaluation, whereas the low 2D: 4D group did the opposite. The activity in the amygdala, anterior insular cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) was increased when participants evaluated morally unorthodox actions (intentional harm). The activity in the posterior superior temporal sulcus/temporoparietal junction (pSTS/TPJ) to accidental harm was decreased, specific to the high 2D: 4D group. The functional connectivity between the amygdala and dlPFC was reduced. The activity in the pSTS/TPJ to perceived agency predicted utilitarian responses to evitable dilemmas. The findings demonstrate the acute effect of testosterone on neural responses associated with moral judgment, and provide evidence to support that prenatal sex-hormones priming could be important for early neurodevelopment, which plays a crucial role in the neural and behavioral manifestations of testosterone on adult moral reasoning. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3417-3430, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.