Neural Underpinnings of Morality Judgment and Moral Aesthetic Judgment

Abstract

Morality judgment usually refers to the evaluation of moral behavior`s ability to affect others` interests and welfare, while moral aesthetic judgment often implies the appraisal of moral behavior's capability to provide aesthetic pleasure. Both are based on the behavioral understanding. To our knowledge, no study has directly compared the brain activity of these two types of judgments. The present study recorded and analyzed brain activity involved in the morality and moral aesthetic judgments to reveal whether these two types of judgments differ in their neural underpinnings. Results reveled that morality judgment activated the frontal, parietal and occipital cortex previously reported for motor representations of behavior. Evaluation of goodness and badness showed similar patterns of activation in these brain regions. In contrast, moral aesthetic judgment elicited specific activations in the frontal, parietal and temporal cortex proved to be involved in the behavioral intentions and emotions. Evaluation of beauty and ugliness showed similar patterns of activation in these brain regions. Our findings indicate that morality judgment and moral aesthetic judgment recruit different cortical networks that might decode others' behaviors at different levels. These results contribute to further understanding of the essence of the relationship between morality judgment and aesthetic judgment.

Neural mechanisms by which facial attractiveness influences the judgments of immoral behaviors

“…However, beautiful and ugly faces in the judgments of moral goodness and badness seemed to activate only brain regions involved in primary visual processing of faces, without inducing brain areas that characterize the emotional meaning of faces. This result may be related to the fact that judgments of moral goodness and badness more focused on the behavior itself and relied on the understanding of objective knowledge of right and wrong norms [40]. The role of face perception in this process may be re ected only in the understanding of behavior by imitating the facial expressions of the actor.…”

“…We examined whether facial attractiveness in uences bad and ugly judgments of immoral behavior from the perspective of neural mechanisms. Considering that morally bad processing is more concerned with moral knowledge of whether the behavior itself is normative, whereas moral aesthetic assessment focuses more on the affective process that produces a change from excellence to disgust for the behavior [40], we hypothesized that the affective meaning carried by ugly faces may affect only morally ugly judgment, but not moral badness. Facial attractiveness may in uence the bad and ugly judgments of immoral behavior in a task-speci c pattern.…”