Moral Violations and the Experience of Disgust and Anger

Abstract

Disgust is a natural defensive emotion that has evolved to protect against potential sources of contamination and has been recently linked to moral judgements in many studies. However, that people often report feelings of disgust when thinking about feces or moral transgressions alike does not necessarily mean that the same mechanisms mediate these reactions. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (n = 22) to investigate whether core and moral disgusts entrain common neural systems. We provide evidence that: (i) activation of overlapping brain regions between core and moral disgust is the result of content overlap in the vignettes—core disgust elicitors—across conditions, and not from moral violations per se, and (ii) moral residue (i.e., the remaining or “residual” activation after the influence of core disgust elicitors have been taken into account) produced a pattern of activation that is more consistent with moral anger, than one of “residual disgust.” These findings run contrary to the premise that our “moral center” is connected to the area of the brain in which physical revulsion is located.

Does inappropriate behavior hurt or stink? The interplay between neural representations of somatic experiences and moral decisions

“…However, such overlap was presumably biased by the presence of explicit elicitors in the description of violations (blood, urine, etc. ), as no evidence of shared activations was found when using experimental materials carefully controlled for this aspect (16).…”

“…In a pilot study, we asked proficient speakers in either French (20 volunteers: 12 females; aged 19 to 50, mean = 28.8, SD = 6.82 years) or English (37 volunteers: 19 females; aged 20 to 43, mean = 28.81, SD = 4.89) to evaluate each of the 44 dilemmas (in their corresponding language) according to the following dimensions: (i) “How much is the course of action described in the story appropriate for you?” (marked on a VAS ranging from “extremely inappropriate” to “extremely appropriate”); (ii) “How emotionally engaged were you when reading the vignette?” (marked on a VAS ranging from “not engaged at all” to “extremely engaged”); (iii) “How comprehensible was the vignette?” (marked using a scale ranging from “extremely incomprehensible” to “extremely comprehensible”). The data from these rating tasks were used to select 32 dilemmas that displayed, in both their English and French formulation, the following properties: (i) half of the dilemmas ( 16 ) were expected to describe strong violations of moral norms and thus had to be associated with the lowest appropriateness ratings and with the highest emotional engagement ratings; (ii) the remaining dilemmas were expected to describe ordinary (nonmorally challenging) behavior and were associated with the highest appropriateness ratings and the lowest emotional engagement ratings; and (iii) all dilemmas were associated with high comprehensibility ratings. Full information about the selected dilemmas and the pilot data are available in the Supplementary Materials (fig.…”

“…Nevertheless, several studies pointed out that moral cognition shares with physical disgust similar facial responses ( 13 ) and neural activity in brain structures associated with negative affect, such as the anterior insula and amygdala ( 14 , 15 ) [but see ( 16 )]. These measures are advantageous in terms of sensitivity, as they capture subtle processes that might not be sufficient to affect overt behavior.…”

The Role of Insular Cortex in Response to Group Therapy in Vaginismus Patients: Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Study

“…9 A functional imaging study reported that insular cortex is activated as a response to disgust in both healthy participants and OCD patients. 10,11 Considering that disgust is a factor that makes treatment difficult, it can be thought that metabolic disorder of the insular cortex may be important role at response to group therapy in vaginismus patients.…”

Erroneously Disgusted: fMRI Study Supports Disgust-Related Neural Reuse in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

“…We were especially interested in the role of the insular cortex since this region has been identified as relevant for disgust processing (next to a variety of other functions) in patients as well as in healthy participants. Group differences were found in both functional imaging and lesion studies (e.g., Wright et al, 2004; Knowles et al, 2018), especially when highly disgusting stimuli were used (Oaten et al, 2018).…”