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

Abstract

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.

What Is behind In-Stream Advertising on YouTube? A Remote Neuromarketing Study employing Eye-Tracking and Facial Coding techniques

“…Second, despite emotions being known to play a crucial role in advertising [79][80][81][82], emotional responses in the context of YouTube in-stream advertising have been little explored, and in particular, no contributions concerning the role of disgust, which is a primary emotional mediator of advertising effects [88][89][90][91], and/or based on the facial expression analysis (FEA) were provided to shed light on the issue addressed by this paper. In this context, the application of facial coding for the investigation of moral disgust during the view of in-stream ads, due to its sensitivity to nonbodily violations (e.g., betrayal or deception) and moralistic anger [102,103], contributed to the emergence of valuable findings, whose interpretations are consistent with the proposed framework [124][125][126][127]. In addition, unlike other measures, disgust-related facial expressions proved to be the most responsive cues to the variation of the non-ad items' presence, as significant differences emerged on all multiple pairwise comparison tests.…”

“…However, limiting the scope of disgust to its association with food, as a mere foodrelated emotion, is highly inaccurate, as the fundamental role of moral disgust would be ignored. In contrast to core disgust, which occurs in response to physical or chemical stimuli, moral disgust arises in response to abstract violations of moral norms which can be further divided into bodily violations (e.g., sexual taboos) and nonbodily violations (e.g., betrayal or deception) [102,103]. While moral disgust associated with bodily violations has received considerable attention in advertising, in particular by studies focused on controversial advertising [104] which demonstrated its negative effect on ad attitude [105] and even behavior [106], the role of moral disgust associated with nonbodily violations has been far less taken into account in advertising research.…”

“…The self-reported measures of interest were selected according to the advertising literature relevant to the current framework. In particular, along with the measures of ad irritation [123,144], ad avoidance [23,110], and ad attitude [145,146] that are traditionally and widely employed in advertising research, self-reported disgust [104,105], although less popular than the previous ones, was taken into consideration as a further useful indicator to describe the entity of the violation [102][103][104][105][106]. In order to mitigate biases potentially arising from the modalities underlying self-report data collection performed through Qualtrics, counterbalancing was employed.…”

Keeping Morality “on the Straight” and Never “on the Bend”: Metaphorical Representations of Moral Concepts in Straightness and Curvature

“…The bidirectional representational relationship between moral concepts and physical attributes shows that impurities causing core disgust, such as dirt and stink, can affect behavior and spatial dimensions of moral judgment. For example, research showed that both moral violations involving and not involving impurity promoted the detection of disgusted faces [ 34 ], and moral violations with impurity cues elicited a higher severity of moral judgments than those without impurity cues [ 35 ]. However, this relationship was modulated by the degree of core disgust priming; one study had found that moral severity ratings for moral transgressions after the presentation of neutral images were significantly higher than those after the presentation of highly disgusting images [ 36 ].…”