The Contribution of Emotion and Cognition to Moral Sensitivity: A Neurodevelopmental Study

Abstract

Whether emotion is a source of moral judgments remains controversial. This study combined neurophysiological measures, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye-tracking, and pupillary response with behavioral measures assessing affective and moral judgments across age. One hundred and twenty-six participants aged between 4 and 37 years viewed scenarios depicting intentional versus accidental actions that caused harm/damage to people and objects. Morally, salient scenarios evoked stronger empathic sadness in young participants and were associated with enhanced activity in the amygdala, insula, and temporal poles. While intentional harm was evaluated as equally wrong across all participants, ratings of deserved punishments and malevolent intent gradually became more differentiated with age. Furthermore, age-related increase in activity was detected in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in response to intentional harm to people, as well as increased functional connectivity between this region and the amygdala. Our study provides evidence that moral reasoning involves a complex integration between affective and cognitive processes that gradually changes with age and can be viewed in dynamic transaction across the course of ontogenesis. The findings support the view that negative emotion alerts the individual to the moral salience of a situation by bringing discomfort and thus can serve as an antecedent to moral judgment.

Business Ethics: The Promise of Neuroscience

“…An example of the application of such methods related to business ethics is the study of Decety et al (2012), which combined neurophysiological measures, including eye-tracking, pupillary response, and fMRI to investigate reactions to morally salient situations. Participants viewed scenarios depicting intentional versus accidental actions that caused harm to people and objects.…”

Precursors to morality in development as a complex interplay between neural, socioenvironmental, and behavioral facets

“…For example, examining the spatiotemporal dynamics of the neural processing when young children view social interactions can help us to better understand the contribution of domain-general processes to early moral thought. Our current knowledge of the brain circuits involved in the development of moral cognition is based on a limited number of studies with young children using electroencephalography (21)(22)(23), functional MRI (24), and lesion studies (25). Due to the methodological constraints of most neuroimaging methods, no study has yet investigated the link between the online neural processing of the perception of prosocial and antisocial others and actual moral preferences and prosocial behaviors in infants and toddlers, as well as their link to parental values.…”

“…Infants were hypothesized to show greater amplitudes for good actions than bad actions in the Nc component, a central negativity between 300 and 500 ms poststimulus that has been previously linked to automatic resource allocation. The youngest infants (12 mo) were not expected to show later controlled differences between the processing of good and bad actions (in the PSW, 600-1,000 ms), however with age and the development of more elaborate cognitive processes, older toddlers (18-24 mo old) were expected to show greater amplitudes in the PSW for the perception of good actions, than bad actions, akin to the late positive potential (LPP) differences seen in preschool children engaged in similar implicit moral evaluations (24). Furthermore, individual differences in the later component were anticipated to predict both children's sharing propensities and preference for the prosocial character.…”

Multidimensional assessment of empathic abilities in patients with insular glioma

“…Despite the extensive history of behavioral psychology and philosophy research, the definition of empathy differs from study to study and has no universally accepted definition (Batson, 2009;Eisenberg, 2000). A large number of studies on empathy stress that the construct is multifaceted, but it is composed of at least two important components (Decety & Jackson, 2004;Decety & Ickes, 2009;Decety, Michalska, & Kinzler, 2012;Eres, Decety, Louis, & Molenberghs, 2015;O'Brien, Konrath, Gruhn, & Hagen, 2013): an affective component, which is defined as the ability to experience an appropriate emotional response of another's state (O'Brien et al, 2013), and a cognitive component, which is related to our capacity to predict and understand another's mental state using cognitive processes (Decety et al, 2012). When we empathize, we vicariously experience the emotional state of the other person while realizing that what we are feeling is not our own affective state but that of another person.…”