The neural mediators of moral attitudes and behaviors

A Libra in the Brain: Neural Correlates of Error Awareness Predict Moral Wrongness and Guilt Proneness

“…Mean signal intensities (Beta weights) were extracted via MarsBaR (Brett, Anton, Valabrgue, & Poline, 2002) within SPM12. The selected ROIs were the amygdala, anterior insula (aIN), medial frontal gyrus (MFG), right posterior superior temporal sulcus/temporal parietal junction (pSTS/TPJ), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), referenced in studies by C. Chen et al (C. Chen et al, 2022; Chenyi Chen et al, 2020; Cheng et al, 2021).…”

“…Unlike our previous studies that employed similar stimuli and designs, where participants were explicitly primed with instructions to mentally simulate the outcome of the forthcoming harming or helping action before each trial, in this study, participants were not informed about the nature of the action—harmful or helpful—they would be simulating at the start of each trial. This approach aimed to more effectively trigger error-related or wrongness-related awareness after the outcomes of these actions were revealed in the subsequent animations (C. Chen et al, 2022; Chenyi Chen et al, 2020; Cheng et al, 2021). They were asked to envision themselves in the given action from a first-person perspective.…”

“…These include the severity of moral transgressions (Huang, Stanley, & De Brigard, 2020) and individual differences in moral judgment (Earp, McLoughlin, Monrad, Clark, & Crockett, 2021; Jin & Peng, 2021; Prehn et al, 2008). Intentional harm, widely recognized as morally reprehensible (K. J. Yoder & J. J. J. o. N. Decety, 2014), underscores the complexity of moral processing, which engages various brain regions such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ), and superior temporal sulcus (STS) (C. Chen, Martinez, Chen, Fan, & Cheng, 2022; Chenyi Chen, Martínez, & Cheng, 2020; de Oliveira-Souza, Zahn, & Moll, 2015).…”

“…Participants engaged in similar tasks in both EEG and fMRI settings, with minor adjustments made to accommodate the scanner’s requirements. Region of Interest (ROI) analysis, focusing on guilt and moral processing, examined the relationship between specific brain regions and error awareness (C. Chen et al, 2022; Chenyi Chen et al, 2020; Cheng et al, 2021). We hypothesized that participants would show increased ERN and LP amplitude in scenarios involving harm, accompanied by a heightened sense of guilt.…”

“…Notably, while extensive research has shed light on how humans process errors using absolute and objective criteria of correctness, to date, no study has examined how the human brain integrates error awareness into the evaluation of subjective moral judgments, leaving the mechanisms involved unclear. Building upon our moral-action mental simulation task (C. Chen et al, 2022; Cheng et al, 2021), we have developed a paradigm involving animations that require participants to envision themselves as agents in scenarios that may or may not involve causing harm to others, accompanied by a subjective moral evaluation of the actions’ wrongness. Here, the study was to determine whether the ERP component known as Error-Related Negativity (ERN), typically associated with objective wrongness, could similarly reflect subjective moral judgments, mirroring its role in objective error awareness, and whether it could predict individual differences in guilt proneness.…”