The Moral Affiliations of Disgust

Abstract

Recent investigations in cognitive neuroscience haveshown that ordinary human behavior is guided by emotions that are uniquely human in their experiential and interpersonal aspects. These ''moral emotions'' contribute importantly to human social behavior and derive from the neurobehavioral reorganization of the basic plan of emotions that pervade mammalian life. Disgust is one prototypic emotion with multiple domains that include viscerosomatic reaction patterns and subjective experiences linked to (a) the sensory properties of a class of natural stimuli, (b) a set of aversive experiences and (c) a unique mode of experiencing morality. In the current investigation, we tested the hypotheses that (a) the experience of disgust devoid of moral connotations (''pure disgust'') can be subjectively and behaviorally differentiated from the experience of disgust disguised in the moral emotion of ''indignation'' and that (b) pure disgust and indignation may have partially overlapping neural substrates. Thirteen normal adult volunteers were investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging as they read a series of statements depicting scenarios of pure disgust, indignation, and neutral emotion. After the scanning procedure, they assigned one basic and one moral emotion to each stimulus from an array of six basic and seven moral emotions. Results indicated that (a) emotional stimuli may evoke pure disgust with or without indignation, (b) these different aspects of the experience of disgust could be elicited by a set of written statements, and (c) pure disgust and indignation recruited both overlapping and distinct brain regions, mainly in the frontal and temporal lobes. This work underscores the importance of the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices in moral judgment and in the automatic attribution of morality to social events. Human disgust encompasses a variety of emotional experiences that are ingrained in frontal, temporal, and limbic networks.

Moral anger, but not moral disgust, responds to intentionality.

“…This view, we argue, is supported by previously cited studies distinguishing anger and disgust, and by recent neuroscience findings showing differences in the brain systems that respond to violations of sexual and nonsexual moral norms (Moll et al, 2005, Schaich Borg, Lieberman, & Kiehl, 2008.…”

Preceding attention and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex: Process specificity versus domain dependence

“…Involvement of attention has also been suspected to account for DMPFC activation in tasks requiring evaluation as for example emotional judgment [Gusnard et al, 2001;Lane et al, 1997;Phan et al, 2002], moral judgment [Greene and Haidt, 2002;Moll et al, 2005], and reappraisal [Kalisch et al, 2006;Ochsner et al, 2002Ochsner et al, , 2004Ochsner and Gross, 2005]. Finally, attentional processes may also be involved in other tasks associate with DMPFC activation like theory of mind, memory retrieval, verbal decision, sexual arousal, face recognition, and mentalizing [Beauregard et al, 2001;Ferretti et al, 2005;Fossati et al, 2003;Frith, 2002;Frith andFrith, 1999, 2003;Gallagher and Frith, 2003;Johnson et al, 2002;Kampe et al, 2003;Kjaer et al, 2002;Lou et al, 2004;Macrae et al, 2004;Maddock et al, 2003;Mitchell et al, 2005;Platek et al, 2004;Stoléru et al, 1999].…”

“…This research has identified the medial prefrontal cortex, and in particular the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), as one of the key regions in processing mental states. For example, the DMPFC has been shown to be activated in various conditions like emotional judgment [Gusnard et al, 2001;Lane et al, 1997;Phan et al, 2002], moral judgment [Greene and Haidt, 2002;Moll et al, 2005], theory of mind tasks [Frith, 2002;Frith andFrith, 1999, 2003;Gallagher and Frith, 2003;Kampe et al, 2003], memory retrieval tasks [Fossati et al, 2003;Lou et al, 2004;Macrae et al, 2004;Maddock et al, 2003], self-related processing [Kelley et al, 2002;Northoff et al, 2006;Wicker et al, 2003;Zysset et al, 2002], mentalizing tasks [Mitchell et al, 2005], verbal decision tasks [Johnson et al, 2002;Kjaer et al, 2002], sexual stimuli [Beauregard et al, 2001;Ferretti et al, 2005;Karama et al, 2002;Park et al, 2001;Stoléru et al, 1999], or face recognition [Platek et al, 2004]. The involvement of the DMPFC in a variety of different tasks (judgment, retrieval, recognition, decision) and in different domains (verbal, facial, social, moral, emotional, sexual) raises the question for its functional organization: is neural activity in the DMPFC instantiated by a particular task, i.e., process, remaining independent of the different domains or is it rather determined by a specific domain rather than by a particular task, i.e., process?…”

Neural evidence for “intuitive prosecution”: The use of mental state information for negative moral verdicts

“…Gazzaniga, 2005;Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001;Haidt, 2001;Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009;Mikhail, 2007;Moll, et al, 2005;Wheatley & Haidt, 2005). The majority of these studies focus on participants' negative evaluations of moral violations, for instance, hitting people with trolleys, breaking promises, distributing resources unfairly, and eating dead pets (Borg, Hynes, Van Horn, Grafton, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006;Cushman, 2008;Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004;Hauser, Cushman, Young, Jin, & Mikhail, 2007;Hsu, Anen, & Quartz, 2008).…”