Moral judgment modulates neural responses to the perception of other's pain: an ERP study.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Cui F
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4749990 | biostudies-other | 2016 Feb
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
Similar Datasets
Project description:When people express a moral judgment, others make inferences about their personality, such as whether they are warm or competent. People may use this interpersonal process to present themselves in a way that is socially acceptable in the current circumstances. Across four studies, we investigated this hypothesis in Chinese culture and showed that college student participants tended to associate others' deontological moral judgments with warmth and utilitarian moral judgments with competence (Study 1, M age = 21.1, SD = 2.45; Study 2, M age = 20.53, SD = 1.87). In addition, participants made more deontological judgments after preparing to be interviewed for a job requiring them to be in a warm social role, and more utilitarian judgments after preparing for a job requiring them to be in a competent social role (Study 3, M age = 19.5, SD = 1.63). This effect held true in moral dilemmas involving different degrees of hypothetical personal involvement, and appeared to be mediated by the perception of others' expectations (Study 4, M age = 19.92, SD = 1.97). The results suggest an important role for social cognition as an influence on moral judgments in Chinese culture.
| S-EPMC8023274 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Pedophilia is a sexual preference that is often associated with child sex offending (CSO). Sexual urges towards prepubescent children and specifically acting upon those urges are universally regarded as immoral. However, up until now, it is completely unknown whether moral processing of sexual offenses is altered in pedophiles. A total of 31 pedophilic men and 19 healthy controls were assessed by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with a moral judgment paradigm consisting of 36 scenarios describing different types of offenses.Scenarios depicting sexual offenses against children compared to those depicting adults were associated with higher pattern of activation in the left temporo-parietal-junction (TPJ) and left posterior insular cortex, the posterior cingulate gyrus as well as the precuneus in controls relative to pedophiles, and vice versa. Moreover, brain activation in these areas were positively associated with ratings of moral reprehensibility and negatively associated with decision durations, but only in controls. Brain activation, found in key areas related to the broad network of moral judgment, theory of mind and (socio-)moral disgust - point to different moral processing of sexual offenses in pedophilia in general. The lack of associations between brain activation and behavioral responses in pedophiles further suggest a biased response pattern or dissected implicit valuation processes.
| S-EPMC5737855 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We propose a revised set of moral dilemmas for studies on moral judgment. We selected a total of 46 moral dilemmas available in the literature and fine-tuned them in terms of four conceptual factors (Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, Evitability, and Intention) and methodological aspects of the dilemma formulation (word count, expression style, question formats) that have been shown to influence moral judgment. Second, we obtained normative codings of arousal and valence for each dilemma showing that emotional arousal in response to moral dilemmas depends crucially on the factors Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, and Intentionality. Third, we validated the dilemma set confirming that people's moral judgment is sensitive to all four conceptual factors, and to their interactions. Results are discussed in the context of this field of research, outlining also the relevance of our RT effects for the Dual Process account of moral judgment. Finally, we suggest tentative theoretical avenues for future testing, particularly stressing the importance of the factor Intentionality in moral judgment. Additionally, due to the importance of cross-cultural studies in the quest for universals in human moral cognition, we provide the new set dilemmas in six languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan, and Danish). The norming values provided here refer to the Spanish dilemma set.
| S-EPMC4077230 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Neuroimaging studies on moral decision-making have thus far largely focused on differences between moral judgments with opposing utilitarian (well-being maximizing) and deontological (duty-based) content. However, these studies have investigated moral dilemmas involving extreme situations, and did not control for two distinct dimensions of moral judgment: whether or not it is intuitive (immediately compelling to most people) and whether it is utilitarian or deontological in content. By contrasting dilemmas where utilitarian judgments are counterintuitive with dilemmas in which they are intuitive, we were able to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of intuitive and counterintuitive judgments across a range of moral situations. Irrespective of content (utilitarian/deontological), counterintuitive moral judgments were associated with greater difficulty and with activation in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that such judgments may involve emotional conflict; intuitive judgments were linked to activation in the visual and premotor cortex. In addition, we obtained evidence that neural differences in moral judgment in such dilemmas are largely due to whether they are intuitive and not, as previously assumed, to differences between utilitarian and deontological judgments. Our findings therefore do not support theories that have generally associated utilitarian and deontological judgments with distinct neural systems.
| S-EPMC3324565 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Counterfactual thinking is thinking about a past that did not happen. This is often the case in "if only…" situations, where we wish something had or had not happened. To make a choice in a moral decision-making situation is particularly hard and, therefore, may be often associated with the imagination of a different outcome. The main aim of the present study is to investigate counterfactual thinking in the context of moral reasoning. We used a modified version of Greene's moral dilemmas test, studying both the time needed to provide a counterfactual in the first and third person and the type of given response (in context-out of context) in a sample of 90 healthy subjects. We found a longer response time for personal vs. impersonal moral dilemmas. This effect was enhanced in the first person perspective, while in the elderly there was an overall slowing of response time. Out of context/omissive responses were more frequent in the case of personal moral dilemmas presented in the first person version, with females showing a marked increase in this kind of response. These findings suggest that gender and perspective have a critical role in counterfactual thinking in the context of moral reasoning, and may have implications for the understanding of gender-related inclinations as well as differences in moral judgment.
| S-EPMC4033199 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Recent evidence indicates that empathic responses to others' pain are modulated by various situational and individual factors. However, few studies have examined how empathy and underlying brain functions are modulated by social hierarchies, which permeate human society with an enormous impact on social behavior and cognition. In this study, social hierarchies were established based on incidental skill in a perceptual task in which all participants were mediumly ranked. Afterwards, participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging while watching inferior-status or superior-status targets receiving painful or non-painful stimulation. The results revealed that painful stimulation applied to inferior-status targets induced higher activations in the anterior insula (AI) and anterior medial cingulate cortex (aMCC), whereas these empathic brain activations were significantly attenuated in response to superior-status targets' pain. Further, this neural empathic bias to inferior-status targets was accompanied by stronger functional couplings of AI with brain regions important in emotional processing (i.e. thalamus) and cognitive control (i.e. middle frontal gyrus). Our findings indicate that emotional sharing with others' pain is shaped by relative positions in a social hierarchy such that underlying empathic neural responses are biased toward inferior-status compared with superior-status individuals.
| S-EPMC4769637 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Is the basis of criminality an act that causes harm, or an act undertaken with the belief that one will cause harm? The present study takes a cognitive neuroscience approach to investigating how information about an agent's beliefs and an action's consequences contribute to moral judgment. We build on prior developmental evidence showing that these factors contribute differentially to the young child's moral judgments coupled with neurobiological evidence suggesting a role for the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) in belief attribution. Participants read vignettes in a 2 x 2 design: protagonists produced either a negative or neutral outcome based on the belief that they were causing the negative outcome ("negative" belief) or the neutral outcome ("neutral" belief). The RTPJ showed significant activation above baseline for all four conditions but was modulated by an interaction between belief and outcome. Specifically, the RTPJ response was highest for cases of attempted harm, where protagonists were condemned for actions that they believed would cause harm to others, even though the harm did not occur. The results not only suggest a general role for belief attribution during moral judgment, but also add detail to our understanding of the interaction between these processes at both the neural and behavioral levels.
| S-EPMC1895935 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Moral judgment can be highly affected by the action and intention factors on a behavior level. Previous neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that the intention factor can modulate both the affective and cognitive processing of moral judgment. The present event-related potentials (ERP) study examined how the action factor modulated the neural dynamics of moral judgment under a newly developed moral dilemma paradigm including three different conditions: harm caused by action (i.e., doing harm), harm caused by omission (i.e., allowing harm), and no harm. Behavior data showed that participants preferred utilitarian judgments and spent less time on the allowing harm condition than for the doing harm condition. ERP results revealed that, compared with the doing harm and no harm dilemmas, the allowing harm dilemmas elicited an enhanced N450 response associated with cognitive control and/or cognitive effort processes, but attenuated a late positive potentials (LPP) response associated with top-down control of attention and cognitive "rational" control processes. Such LPP amplitude differences were positively correlated with the C-score of the moral competence test which indexed the cognitive aspect of moral judgment competency. These findings suggested that people have a strong omission bias, and such an action factor modulates the conscious reasoning process during moral judgment, including the cognitive control and/or cognitive effort, and attentional allocation processes.
| S-EPMC7815760 | biostudies-literature
Project description: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.
| S-EPMC6867570 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Pain has been found to promote reward-seeking behaviors, which might be a consequence of modulated brain activities in the reward neural circuitry in a painful state. The present study investigated how pain affected reward processing and reward-related neural activities using fMRI technique. A total of 50 healthy participants were recruited and used for data analyses, with half being treated with topical capsaicin cream and the other half with hand cream (treatment: pain or control). The participants were asked to perform a card-guessing game when their brain activities responding to feedbacks (outcome: win or loss) were recorded. Behavioral results showed that participants in pain group overestimated their correct choices in the card-guess game. Whole-brain fMRI analysis revealed that the main effect of outcome (win vs. loss) activated a typical network of the reward neural circuitry, including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the bilateral nucleus accumbens (NAcc). Importantly, the region of interest analysis revealed a significant interaction of treatment and outcome in the mPFC, with increased mPFC neural activity responding to win outcome in pain condition. Moreover, the functional connectivity between the mPFC and the NAcc was decreased in pain condition. We conclude that the pain-induced modulation of the mPFC activity could result in alterations of both the emotional response to and the cognitive evaluation of reward.
| S-EPMC7267926 | biostudies-literature