Moll Jorge, de Oliveira-Souza Ricardo, Garrido Griselda J, Bramati Ivanei E, Caparelli-Daquer Egas M A, Paiva Mirella L M F, Zahn Roland, Grafman Jordan
Cognitive Neuroscience Section, NINDS, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
Soc Neurosci. 2007;2(3-4):336-52. doi: 10.1080/17470910701392024.
The human brain is inherently able to understand the world in moral ways, endowing most of us with an intuitive sense of fairness, concern for others, and observance of cultural norms. We have argued that this moral sensitivity ability depends on a sophisticated integration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms, which are modulated by individual experience in different cultural milieus. Different lines of investigation on agency and morality have pointed to overlapping neural systems. Therefore, understanding the relationships between morality and agency may provide key insights into the mechanisms underlying human behavior in several clinical and societal settings. We used functional MRI to investigate the contribution of agency and of specific moral emotions to brain activation using action scripts. Results showed that emotionally neutral agency recruited neural networks previously associated with agency, intentionality and moral cognition, encompassing ventral and subgenual sectors of the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), insula, anterior temporal cortex and superior temporal sulcus (STS). Compared to emotionally neutral agency, different categories of moral emotions led to distinct activation patterns: (1) prosocial emotions (guilt, embarrassment, compassion) activated the anterior medial PFC and STS, with (2) empathic emotions (guilt and compassion) additionally recruiting the mesolimbic pathway; (3) other-critical emotions (disgust and indignation) were associated with activation of the amygdala-parahippocampal and fusiform areas. These findings indicate that agency related to norm-abiding social behaviors of emotionally neutral scripts share neural substrates both with the "default mode" of brain function and with the moral sensitivity network. Additional activation in specific components of this network is elicited by different classes of moral emotions, in agreement with recent integrative models of moral cognition and emotion.
人类大脑天生就能够以道德方式理解世界，赋予我们大多数人一种公平感、对他人的关心以及对文化规范的遵守的直观感受。我们认为，这种道德敏感性能力取决于认知、情感和动机机制的复杂整合，这些机制会受到不同文化环境中个体经历的调节。关于能动性与道德的不同研究方向都指向了重叠的神经回路。因此，理解道德与能动性之间的关系可能会为多种临床和社会环境中人类行为背后的机制提供关键见解。我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI），通过行动脚本研究能动性和特定道德情感对大脑激活的作用。结果显示，情绪中性的能动性激活了先前与能动性、意图性和道德认知相关的神经网络，包括内侧前额叶皮质（PFC）的腹侧和膝下部分、脑岛、颞叶前部皮质和颞上沟（STS）。与情绪中性的能动性相比，不同类别的道德情感会导致不同的激活模式：（1）亲社会情感（内疚、尴尬、同情）激活了前额叶内侧前部和STS，（2）共情情感（内疚和同情）还额外激活了中脑边缘通路；（3）对他人批判性的情感（厌恶和愤慨）与杏仁核 - 海马旁回和梭状回区域的激活相关。这些发现表明，与情绪中性脚本中遵守规范的社会行为相关的能动性，与大脑功能的“默认模式”以及道德敏感性网络共享神经基础。该网络特定组成部分的额外激活是由不同类别的道德情感引发的，这与最近的道德认知和情感整合模型一致。
