Moral judgment modulates neural responses to the perception of other’s pain: an ERP study

Abstract

Morality and empathy are both crucial in building human society. Yet the relationship between them has been merely explored. The present study revealed how the morality influenced empathy for pain by comparing the ERPs elicited by pictures showing the targets’ in pain primed by different moral information about the targets. We found that when the target was a moral one or a neutral one, the painful pictures elicited significantly larger amplitude in N2 than the non-painful pictures, but when the target was an immoral one, the difference between the amplitudes of N2 component elicited by painful and non-painful pictures became insignificant. We proposed that this effect was induced by the decreased affective arousal when observing an immoral person in pain. The reduced neural response towards the immoral one’s pain can keep us alert when we face the potentially dangerous people thereby increasing our chance of survival. SLORTEA results showed the source of this difference in N2 localized in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) areas.