Converging evidence suggests that emotion processing mediated by ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is necessary to prevent personal moral violations. In moral dilemmas, for example, patients with lesions in vmPFC are more willing than normal controls to approve harmful actions that maximize good consequences (e.g., utilitarian moral judgments). Yet, none of the existing studies has measured subjects' emotional responses while they considered moral dilemmas. Therefore, a direct link between emotion processing and moral judgment is still lacking. Here, vmPFC patients and control participants considered moral dilemmas while skin conductance response (SCR) was measured as a somatic index of affective state. Replicating previous evidence, vmPFC patients approved more personal moral violations than did controls. Critically, we found that, unlike control participants, vmPFC patients failed to generate SCRs before endorsing personal moral violations. In addition, such anticipatory SCRs correlated negatively with the frequency of utilitarian judgments in normal participants. These findings provide direct support to the hypothesis that the vmPFC promotes moral behavior by mediating the anticipation of the emotional consequences of personal moral violations.
Abstract:Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting voluntary motor control. shift towards the preceding action that caused the tone, relative to a baseline condition involving tones only. The patients were tested both on and off dopaminergic medication. PD patients off medication showed no significant change in action-effect binding relative to controls. Conversely, PD patients on medication showed a significant increase in actioneffect binding relative to their own performance off medication. Increased availability of dopamine strengthened the experience of association between actions and external events, enhancing the sense of agency. These results shed light on the contribution of dopamine to the experience of instrumental action, and also on impulse control disorders and psychosis in medicated PD patients.
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