Role of emotion and empathy in moral judgments of real-life situations

2014-12-09Recent work in psychology has demonstrated an influence of emotions, such as compassion, anger and disgust on the level of punishment levied on a moral transgressor (DeSteno, Bartlett, Baumann, Williams, and Dickens, 2006; Ugazio, Lamm, and Singer, 2012). Neuroimaging studies too have investigated moral reasoning, and suggest that moral judgment engages brain structures similar to those involved in emotion processing and perspective taking. To better understand the influence of emotion and empathy on moral judgment, I created video clips that depict transgressors engaging in everyday, real-life immoral acts and depending on the outcome of the act, transgressors would display a happy, sad or no emotion. I investigated participants’ psychophysiological responses (heart rate and skin conductance), neural activity patterns and natural behavior as they made judgments of the transgressors’ actions. ❧ My dissertation is comprised of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I demonstrated that changes in participants’ psychophysiological responses i.e. heart rate and skin conductance was related to the influence of the transgressor’s emotion display on the participants’ moral judgment. ❧ In Chapters 2 and 3, I elucidate the neural basis of moral judgment of everyday life situations and how emotion displayed by the transgressor influences activity in those brain regions. I also probed network connectivity, specifically the interaction between the default mode network of the brain with other brain regions during moral judgment, and the relationship between inter-network connectivity of the default mode and salience networks of the brain and moral judgment. I found that subjects whose moral judgments were influenced by the transgressors’ emotion display showed stronger connectivity at rest between the default mode network and brain regions engaged in emotion processing and self-related processing. ❧ Finally, I briefly discuss the finding of how participants’ trait empathy correlate to differences in the influence of emotion on moral judgment. I end with a brief discussion of the correlation between the participants’ natural, spontaneous behavior and their moral judgment