Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke-NUS Medical School, 8 College Road, 169857, Singapore, Singapore.
Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program, Duke-NUS Medical School, 8 College Road, Singapore, 169857, Singapore.
Sci Rep. 2017 Sep 7;7(1):10887. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-11147-7.
Moral judgments are not just the product of conscious reasoning, but also involve the integration of social and emotional information. Irrelevant disgust stimuli modulate moral judgments, with individual sensitivity determining the direction and size of effects across both hypothetical and incentive-compatible experimental designs. We investigated the neural circuitry underlying this modulation using fMRI in 19 individuals performing a moral judgment task with subliminal priming of disgust facial expressions. Our results indicate that individual changes in moral acceptability due to priming covaried with individual differences in activation within the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Further, whole-brain analyses identified changes in functional connectivity between the dmPFC and the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ). High sensitivity individuals showed enhanced functional connectivity between the TPJ and dmPFC, corresponding with deactivation in the dmPFC, and rating the moral dilemmas as more acceptable. Low sensitivity individuals showed the opposite pattern of results. Post-hoc, these findings replicated in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (daMCC), an adjacent region implicated in converting between objective and subjective valuation. This suggests a specific computational mechanism - that disgust stimuli modulate moral judgments by altering the integration of social information to determine the subjective valuation of the considered moral actions.
道德判断不仅是有意识推理的产物,还涉及社会和情感信息的整合。无关的厌恶刺激会调节道德判断,个体敏感性决定了在假设和激励相容实验设计中影响的方向和大小。我们使用 fMRI 在 19 名个体中进行了一项道德判断任务,该任务使用厌恶面部表情的潜意识启动,研究了这种调节的神经回路。我们的结果表明,由于启动而导致的道德可接受性的个体变化与背内侧前额叶皮层(dmPFC)内的个体差异激活相关。此外,全脑分析确定了 dmPFC 和颞顶联合区(TPJ)之间功能连接的变化。高敏感性个体表现出 TPJ 和 dmPFC 之间功能连接的增强,与 dmPFC 的去激活相对应,并且将道德困境评定为更可接受。低敏感性个体表现出相反的结果模式。事后,这些发现在前扣带皮层(daMCC)中得到了复制,daMCC 是一个与客观和主观估值之间转换相关的相邻区域。这表明存在一种特定的计算机制——厌恶刺激通过改变社会信息的整合来调节道德判断,从而确定所考虑的道德行为的主观价值。