43
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Moral judgment modulation by disgust is bi-directionally moderated by individual sensitivity

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Modern theories of moral judgment predict that both conscious reasoning and unconscious emotional influences affect the way people decide about right and wrong. In a series of experiments, we tested the effect of subliminal and conscious priming of disgust facial expressions on moral dilemmas. “Trolley-car”-type scenarios were used, with subjects rating how acceptable they found the utilitarian course of action to be. On average, subliminal priming of disgust facial expressions resulted in higher rates of utilitarian judgments compared to neutral facial expressions. Further, in replication, we found that individual change in moral acceptability ratings due to disgust priming was modulated by individual sensitivity to disgust, revealing a bi-directional function. Our second replication extended this result to show that the function held for both subliminally and consciously presented stimuli. Combined across these experiments, we show a reliable bi-directional function, with presentation of disgust expression primes to individuals with higher disgust sensitivity resulting in more utilitarian judgments (i.e., number-based) and presentations to individuals with lower sensitivity resulting in more deontological judgments (i.e., rules-based). Our results may reconcile previous conflicting reports of disgust modulation of moral judgment by modeling how individual sensitivity to disgust determines the direction and degree of this effect.

          Related collections

          Most cited references25

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Affect, cognition, and awareness: affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures.

          The affective primacy hypothesis (R. B. Zajonc, 1980) asserts that positive and negative affective reactions can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing. The present work tested this hypothesis by comparing the effects of affective and cognitive priming under extremely brief (suboptimal) and longer (optimal) exposure durations. At suboptimal exposures only affective primes produced significant shifts in Ss' judgments of novel stimuli. These results suggest that when affect is elicited outside of conscious awareness, it is diffuse and nonspecific, and its origin and address are not accessible. Having minimal cognitive participation, such gross and nonspecific affective reactions can therefore be diffused or displaced onto unrelated stimuli. At optimal exposures this pattern of results was reversed such that only cognitive primes produced significant shifts in judgments. Together, these results support the affective primacy hypothesis.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Cerebral mechanisms of word masking and unconscious repetition priming.

            We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to visualize the cerebral processing of unseen masked words. Within the areas associated with conscious reading, masked words activated left extrastriate, fusiform and precentral areas. Furthermore, masked words reduced the amount of activation evoked by a subsequent conscious presentation of the same word. In the left fusiform gyrus, this repetition suppression phenomenon was independent of whether the prime and target shared the same case, indicating that case-independent information about letter strings was extracted unconsciously. In comparison to an unmasked situation, however, the activation evoked by masked words was drastically reduced and was undetectable in prefrontal and parietal areas, correlating with participants' inability to report the masked words.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Emotional perception: meta-analyses of face and natural scene processing.

              Functional imaging studies of emotional processing typically contain neutral control conditions that serve to remove simple effects of visual perception, thus revealing the additional emotional process. Here we seek to identify similarities and differences across 100 studies of emotional face processing and 57 studies of emotional scene processing, using a coordinate-based meta-analysis technique. The overlay of significant meta-analyses resulted in extensive overlap in clusters, coupled with offset and unique clusters of reliable activity. The area of greatest overlap is the amygdala, followed by regions of medial prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal/orbitofrontal cortex, inferior temporal cortex, and extrastriate occipital cortex. Emotional face-specific clusters were identified in regions known to be involved in face processing, including anterior fusiform gyrus and middle temporal gyrus, and emotional scene studies were uniquely associated with lateral occipital cortex, as well as pulvinar and the medial dorsal nucleus of the thalamus. One global result of the meta-analysis reveals that a class of visual stimuli (faces vs. scenes) has a considerable impact on the resulting emotion effects, even after removing the basic visual perception effects through subtractive contrasts. Pure effects of emotion may thus be difficult to remove for the particular class of stimuli employed in an experimental paradigm. Whether a researcher chooses to tightly control the various elements of the emotional stimuli, as with posed face photographs, or allow variety and environmental realism into their evocative stimuli, as with natural scenes, will depend on the desired generalizability of their results. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                06 March 2014
                2014
                : 5
                : 194
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore
                [2] 2Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore, Singapore
                [3] 3Neurobiology Programme, National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore
                [4] 4Singapore Institute for Neurotechnology, Centre for Life Sciences, National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore
                [5] 5Cognitive Science Lab, Temasek Laboratories, National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore
                Author notes

                Edited by: Sarah F. Brosnan, Georgia State University, USA

                Reviewed by: Fiery Cushman, Brown University, USA; Chenbo Wang, Peking University, China

                *Correspondence: Julian Lim, Singapore Institute for Neurotechnology, Centre for Life Sciences, National University of Singapore, 28 Medical Drive, #05-COR, Singapore 117456, Singapore e-mail: tsllzj@ 123456nus.edu.sg ; O’Dhaniel A. Mullette-Gillman, Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Block AS4, #02-07, 9 Arts Link, Singapore 117570, Singapore e-mail: odhaniel@ 123456nus.edu.sg

                This article was submitted to Decision Neuroscience, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00194
                3944793
                24639665
                b1a9b67c-f923-4093-aa70-ce5a1ee9d224
                Copyright © 2014 Ong, Mullette-Gillman, Kwok and Lim.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 28 November 2013
                : 19 February 2014
                Page count
                Figures: 4, Tables: 0, Equations: 1, References: 40, Pages: 8, Words: 0
                Categories
                Neuroscience
                Original Research Article

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                moral judgment,decision-making,subliminal priming,disgust,utilitarian

                Comments

                Comment on this article