INECO, Pacheco de Melo 1854, Buenos Aires 1126, Argentina.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2013 Oct;8(7):780-8. doi: 10.1093/scan/nss067. Epub 2012 Jun 11.
Faced with a moral dilemma, conflict arises between a cognitive controlled response aimed at maximizing welfare, i.e. the utilitarian judgment, and an emotional aversion to harm, i.e. the deontological judgment. In the present study, we investigated moral judgment in adult individuals with high functioning autism/Asperger syndrome (HFA/AS), a clinical population characterized by impairments in prosocial emotions and social cognition. In Experiment 1, we compared the response patterns of HFA/AS participants and neurotypical controls to moral dilemmas with low and high emotional saliency. We found that HFA/AS participants more frequently delivered the utilitarian judgment. Their perception of appropriateness of moral transgression was similar to that of controls, but HFA/AS participants reported decreased levels of emotional reaction to the dilemma. In Experiment 2, we explored the way in which demographic, clinical and social cognition variables including emotional and cognitive aspects of empathy and theory of mind influenced moral judgment. We found that utilitarian HFA/AS participants showed a decreased ability to infer other people's thoughts and to understand their intentions, as measured both by performance on neuropsychological tests and through dispositional measures. We conclude that greater prevalence of utilitarianism in HFA/AS is associated with difficulties in specific aspects of social cognition.
面对道德困境，旨在最大化福利的认知控制反应（即功利主义判断）与对伤害的情感厌恶（即义务论判断）之间会产生冲突。在本研究中，我们调查了高功能自闭症/阿斯伯格综合征（HFA/AS）成年个体的道德判断，这是一种以亲社会情感和社会认知受损为特征的临床人群。在实验 1 中，我们比较了 HFA/AS 参与者和神经典型对照组对低和高情绪显著性道德困境的反应模式。我们发现，HFA/AS 参与者更频繁地做出功利主义判断。他们对道德违规行为的适当性的看法与对照组相似，但 HFA/AS 参与者报告对困境的情绪反应水平降低。在实验 2 中，我们探讨了人口统计学、临床和社会认知变量（包括同理心的情感和认知方面以及心理理论）如何影响道德判断。我们发现，功利主义的 HFA/AS 参与者在推断他人的想法和理解他们的意图方面表现出较差的能力，这可以通过神经心理学测试和性格测量来衡量。我们得出结论，HFA/AS 中功利主义的更高流行率与社会认知的特定方面的困难有关。
