Modulation of incentivized dishonesty by disgust facial expressions

Abstract

Disgust modulates moral decisions involving harming others. We recently specified that this effect is bi-directionally modulated by individual sensitivity to disgust. Here, we show that this effect generalizes to the moral domain of honesty and extends to outcomes with real-world impact. We employed a dice-rolling task in which participants were incentivized to dishonestly report outcomes to increase their potential final monetary payoff. Disgust or control facial expressions were presented subliminally on each trial. Our results reveal that the disgust facial expressions altered honest reporting as a bi-directional function moderated by individual sensitivity. Combining these data with those from prior experiments revealed that the effect of disgust presentation on both harm judgments and honesty could be accounted for by the same bidirectional function, with no significant effect of domain. This clearly demonstrates that disgust facial expressions produce the same modulation of moral judgments across different moral foundations (harm and honesty). Our results suggest strong overlap in the cognitive/neural processes of moral judgments across moral foundations, and provide a framework for further studies to specify the integration of emotional information in moral decision making.

Mechanisms for attentional modulation by threatening emotions of fear, anger, and disgust

“…Furthermore, going beyond the prior work (Liu et al, 2015), in this study we statistically compared the emotional effects on spatial attention between individuals with low and high disgust sensitivity. It is known that responses to disgust elicitors vary considerably among individuals (Borg, de Jong, Renken, & Georgiadis, 2013;Lim et al, 2015;Sherlock, Zietsch, Tyber, & Jern, 2016). Our results revealed that the intensity of attention modulation by disgust (reflected by attentional bias scores of the N1 and P3a amplitudes) significantly correlated with self-report measures of disgust sensitivity (Fig.…”

“…The masked version of the dot-probe task was designed according to previous studies (Carlson et al, 2014;Carlson et al, 2013;Lim, Ho, & Mullette-Gillman, 2015;Liu et al, 2015;D. Zhang, Wang, Luo, & Luo, 2012).…”

“…1, each trial had a 17-ms cue that consisted of two faces. We selected 17 ms as the presentation period of the facial expressions because many previous studies had suggested that healthy adults reported no awareness of masked faces of this duration (Dannlowski et al, 2006;Liddell et al, 2005;Lim et al, 2015;Williams et al, 2006;D. Zhang et al, 2012).…”

Moral judgment modulation by disgust priming via altered fronto-temporal functional connectivity

“…We recently specified this effect, showing that the direction and degree of the modulation of moral judgments by disgust priming is dependent on the sensitivity of an individual to disgusting stimuli – that presentation of disgust facial expressions result in increased acceptability of utilitarian actions for individuals with high disgust sensitivity and reduced acceptability for those with low sensitivity 6 . Further, we have replicated and extended this finding by showing that this effect extends to incentive-compatible choices in a economic task (extending from the moral foundation of personal harm to honesty), in which the disgust primes resulted in increased likelihood of cheating behavior in participants with high sensitivity and decreased likelihood of cheating for those with low sensitivity 5 . Intriguingly, combining the data across these studies demonstrated that the function was indistinguishable across these tasks, suggesting that the same cognitive and neural mechanisms may be at play in both.…”

“…In three previous behavioral experiments 5 , 6 , we found that the average individual change in acceptability ratings due to emotional priming was correlated with individual differences in disgust sensitivity (DS-R). Within the current smaller fMRI sample, this relationship was not significant (r = 0.02, p = 0.94).…”