Neural Foundation of Morality

Zahn, Roland; Oliveira‐Souza, Ricardo de; Moll, Jorge

doi:10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.56026-7

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…There is some disagreement about which emotions are considered moral ( Eisenberg, 2000 ; Tangney et al, 2007a ). Immanuel Kant, a contemporary of Hume, distinguished the ability to judge what is morally right and wrong (“principium diiudicationis”) from the motivation (“principium motivationis”) to act accordingly ( Kant, 1786 ; Zahn et al, 2015 ). He was opposed to the notion that moral actions could be defined on the basis of experienced moral sentiments, which he considered as originating from the external senses.…”

Section: Moral Sentiments As Social Feelings: Neural Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By demonstrating which brain regions are necessary for moral and prosocial behaviour, lesion studies provide important insights, even if they relate to less confined anatomical areas and in some instances have to infer sentiments from observed behaviour. Already in the 19th century, Welt concluded that damage to the right medial orbital region was necessary to produce a change in moral character in a neuropathological case series ( Zahn et al, 2015 ). In the 1980s, Eslinger and Damasio (1985) stimulated new interest in the neuroanatomy of the ventromedial frontal cortex (FC) by describing EVR, a patient with impaired moral and social behaviour.…”

Section: Moral Sentiments As Social Feelings: Neural Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The neuroscience of social feelings: mechanisms of adaptive social functioning

Eslinger

Anders

Ballarini

et al. 2021

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

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Social feelings have conceptual and empirical connections with affect and emotion. In this review, we discuss how they relate to cognition, emotion, behavior and well-being. We examine the functional neuroanatomy and neurobiology of social feelings and their role in adaptive social functioning. Existing neuroscience literature is reviewed to identify concepts, methods and challenges that might be addressed by social feelings research. Specific topic areas highlight the influence and modulation of social feelings on interpersonal affiliation, parent-child attachments, moral sentiments, interpersonal stressors, and emotional communication. Brain regions involved in social feelings were confirmed by meta-analysis using the Neurosynth platform for large-scale, automated synthesis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data. Words that relate specifically to social feelings were identfied as potential research variables. Topical inquiries into social media behaviors, loneliness, trauma, and social sensitivity, especially with recent physical distancing for guarding public and personal health, underscored the increasing importance of social feelings for affective and second person neuroscience research with implications for brain development, physical and mental health, and lifelong adaptive functioning.

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Section: Moral Sentiments As Social Feelings: Neural Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Moral Sentiments As Social Feelings: Neural Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The neuroscience of social feelings: mechanisms of adaptive social functioning

Eslinger

Anders

Ballarini

et al. 2021

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

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“…Social knowledge has been defined as knowledge of one's own and other people's minds ( Adolphs, 2009 ). Because “mind” or “mental states” are hard to break down neuropsychologically, we prefer defining social knowledge as denoting non-episodic (i.e., semantic) knowledge of social sensory properties and social behaviour [i.e., functions ( Zahn, de Oliveira-Souza, & Moll, 2015 )]. Socially appropriate behaviour requires knowledge of adequate social actions within a given short-term sequential context [e.g., ”to appropriately touch a romantic partner after a romantic date” but not “the waiter/waitress after dinner in a restaurant” ( Wood & Grafman, 2003 )].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration and social behaviour: Dissociation between the knowledge of its consequences and its conceptual meaning

Zahn

Green

Beaumont

et al. 2017

Cortex

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Inappropriate social behaviour is an early symptom of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) in both behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and semantic dementia (SD) subtypes. Knowledge of social behaviour is essential for appropriate social conduct. The superior anterior temporal lobe (ATL) has been identified as one key neural component for the conceptual knowledge of social behaviour, but it is unknown whether this is dissociable from knowledge of the consequences of social behaviour. Here, we used a newly-developed test of knowledge about long-term and short-term consequences of social behaviour to investigate its impairment in patients with FTLD relative to a previously-developed test of social conceptual knowledge. We included 19 healthy elderly control participants and 19 consecutive patients with features of bvFTD or SD and defined dissociations as performance differences between tasks for each patient (Bonferroni-corrected p < .05). Knowledge of long-term consequences was selectively impaired relative to short-term consequences in five patients and the reverse dissociation occurred in one patient. Six patients showed a selective impairment of social concepts relative to long-term consequences with the reverse dissociation occurring in one patient. These results corroborate the hypothesis that knowledge of long-term consequences of social behaviour is dissociable from knowledge of short-term consequences, as well as of social conceptual knowledge. Confirming our hypothesis, we found that patients with more marked grey matter (GM) volume loss in frontopolar relative to right superior ATL regions of interest exhibited poorer knowledge of the long-term consequences of social behaviour relative to the knowledge of its conceptual meaning and vice versa (n = 15). These findings support the hypothesis that frontopolar and ATL regions represent distinct aspects of social knowledge. This suggests that rather than being unable to suppress urges to behave inappropriately, FTLD patients often lose the knowledge of what appropriate social behaviour is and can therefore not be expected to behave accordingly.

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“…For this task, moral behaviors were defined as “behaviour that is in accordance with other people's needs or sociocultural norms” (Zahn, de Oliveira‐Souza, & Moll, , p. 606). The sentences were revised based on the materials used in our previous study (Peng et al, ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The time course of indirect moral judgment in gossip processing modulated by different agents

et al. 2017

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Previous studies have investigated personal moral violations with different references (i.e., the protagonists in moral scenarios are the participants themselves or unknown other individuals). However, the roles of various agents in moral judgments have remained unclear. In the present study, ERPs were used to investigate moral judgments when the participants viewed gossip that described (im)moral behaviors committed by different agents (self, friend, celebrity). The results demonstrate that the P2 and late positive component (LPC) correspond to two successive processes of indirect moral judgment when individuals process gossip. Specifically, the P2 amplitude in the celebrity condition was more sensitive in distinguishing immoral behaviors from moral behaviors than that in the other two conditions, whereas the moral valence effect on the LPC was predominately driven by the self-reference. These findings expand our current understanding of moral judgments in a gossip evaluation task and demonstrate that the early processing of gossip depends on both the entertainment value of the agent and the salience of moral behaviors. Processing in the later stage reflects reactions to intensified affective stimuli, or reflects cognitive effort that was required to resolve the conflict between negative gossip about self and the self-positivity bias.

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Neural Foundation of Morality

Cited by 3 publications

References 88 publications

The neuroscience of social feelings: mechanisms of adaptive social functioning

The neuroscience of social feelings: mechanisms of adaptive social functioning

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration and social behaviour: Dissociation between the knowledge of its consequences and its conceptual meaning

The time course of indirect moral judgment in gossip processing modulated by different agents

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