A Psychophysiological Investigation of Moral Judgment after Ventromedial Prefrontal Damage
Abstract
Converging evidence suggests that emotion processing mediated by ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is necessary to prevent personal moral violations. In moral dilemmas, for example, patients with lesions in vmPFC are more willing than normal controls to approve harmful actions that maximize good consequences (e.g., utilitarian moral judgments). Yet, none of the existing studies has measured subjects' emotional responses while they considered moral dilemmas. Therefore, a direct link between emotion processing and moral judgment is still lacking. Here, vmPFC patients and control participants considered moral dilemmas while skin conductance response (SCR) was measured as a somatic index of affective state. Replicating previous evidence, vmPFC patients approved more personal moral violations than did controls. Critically, we found that, unlike control participants, vmPFC patients failed to generate SCRs before endorsing personal moral violations. In addition, such anticipatory SCRs correlated negatively with the frequency of utilitarian judgments in normal participants. These findings provide direct support to the hypothesis that the vmPFC promotes moral behavior by mediating the anticipation of the emotional consequences of personal moral violations.
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Neither Greene's nor Moll's concept can exhaustively explain why vmPFC patients demonstrated a rationally biased approach to solving moral dilemmas, yet an emotionally biased approach to moral cognition in an economic game.
“Apart from that, neither Greene’s nor Moll’s concept can exhaustively explain why vmPFC patients demonstrated a rationally biased approach to solving moral dilemmas (Koenigs et al. 2007; Moretto et al. 2010), yet, an emotionally biased approach to moral cognition in an economic game (Koenigs and Tranel 2007).”
From Parsing the neural correlates of moral cognition: ALE meta-analysis on morality, theory of mind, and empathy (2012) · cites this paper as Moretto et al. 2010
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- Authors
- Moretto, G., Làdavas, E., Mattioli, F., & di Pellegrino, G.
- Affiliations
- University of Bologna (IT)
- Azienda Socio Sanitaria Territoriale degli Spedali Civili di Brescia (IT)
- 1Università di Bologna, Italy
- Venue
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Published
- 2010-08-01
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 1888-1899
- ISSN
- 0898-929X (ISSN-L)
- 1530-8898
- OpenAlex
- W2035848775
- Cited by
- 182
- References
- 83
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 18 · 2017: 13 · 2016: 17 · 2015: 13 · 2014: 16 · 2013: 19 · 2012: 18
- FWCI
- 3.87
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Archivio istituzionale della ricerca (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Ethics in Business and Education
- Keywords
- ventromedial prefrontal cortex, moral judgment, ethical dilemmas, utilitarian judgment, emotional processing, skin conductance response, anticipatory emotions, psychophysiology, brain lesions
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Aged, Analysis of Variance, Brain Damage, Chronic, Brain Mapping, Decision Making, Female, Galvanic Skin Response, Humans, Judgment, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Middle Aged, Models, Psychological, Morals, Neuropsychological Tests, Psychophysiology, Reaction Time, Tomography, X-Ray Computed, Prefrontal Cortex
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