The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) has been implicated as a critical neural substrate mediating the influence of emotion on moral reasoning. It has been shown that the vmPFC is especially important for making moral judgments about “high-conflict” moral dilemmas involving direct personal actions, i.e., scenarios that pit compelling utilitarian considerations of aggregate welfare against the highly emotionally aversive act of directly causing harm to others (Koenigs, Young et al., 2007). The current study was designed to elucidate further the role of the vmPFC in high-conflict moral judgments, including those that involve indirect personal actions, such as indirectly causing harm to one’s kin to save a group of strangers. We found that patients with vmPFC lesions were more likely than brain-damaged and healthy comparison participants to endorse utilitarian outcomes on high-conflict dilemmas regardless of whether the dilemmas (1) entailed direct versus indirect personal harms, and (2) were presented from the Self versus Other perspective. Additionally, all groups were more likely to endorse utilitarian outcomes in the Other perspective as compared to the Self perspective. These results provide important extensions of previous work, and the findings align with the proposal that the vmPFC is critical for reasoning about moral dilemmas in which anticipating the social-emotional consequences of an action (e.g., guilt or remorse) is crucial for normal moral judgments (Koenigs, Young et al., 2007; Greene 2007).

As we learn new information about the social and moral behaviors of other people, we form and update character judgments of them, and this can profoundly influence how we regard and act towards others. In the study reported here, we capitalized on two interesting neurological patient populations where this process of complex "moral updating" may go awry: patients with bilateral damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and patients with bilateral damage to hippocampus (HC). We predicted that vmPFC patients, who have impaired emotion processing, would exhibit reduced moral updating, and we also investigated how moral updating might be affected by severe declarative memory impairment in HC patients. The vmPFC, HC, and brain-damaged comparison (BDC) participants made moral judgments about unfamiliar persons before and after exposure to social scenarios depicting the persons engaged in morally good, bad, or neutral behaviors. In line with our prediction, the vmPFC group showed the least amount of change in moral judgments, and interestingly, the HC group showed the most amount of change. These results suggest that the vmPFC and hippocampus play critical but complementary roles in updating moral character judgments about others: the vmPFC may attribute emotional salience to moral information, whereas the hippocampus may provide necessary contextual information from which to make appropriate character judgments.

The nucleotide sequences of 16 newly reported and 8 previously reported actin-encoding macronuclear DNA molecules in spirotrichs have been compared. As described for the eight previously reported molecules, the first 50 bases (noncoding) inside the telomere at both 5' strands in additional actin molecules are purine-rich. This anomalous base composition might serve as a signal to identify macronuclear molecules in micronuclear DNA during development. The 50-base segment upstream of the ATG in the 5' leaders of the actin molecules contains extensive, conserved sequence motifs that are possibly promoter elements. The 3' noncoding trailers contain virtually no conserved sequence motifs. With one exception, the 3' trailers contain a second stop codon (TGA) 36 bases on average downstream of the primary stop codon. Excluding Moneuplotes crassus, amino acid identities in actin I range from 78 to 100%, with variations distributed nonrandomly along the sequence. Phylogenetic trees based on the actin nucleotide sequences of 22 spirotrichs define the evolutionary relationships of their actin-encoding molecules. The actin phylogeny, while well supported by posterior probabilities, does not always coincide with the phylogeny defined in rDNA analyses or classical taxonomic classifications.

Objective A well-documented effect of focal ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) damage is a deficit in real-world decision-making. An important aspect of this deficit may be a deficiency in “internal consistency” during social decision-making – that is, impaired congruence between expressed preferences versus actual behavioral choices. An example of low internal consistency would be if one expressed the desire to marry someone with impeccable moral character,” yet proceeded to marry someone convicted of multiple felonies. Here, we used a neuropsychological approach to investigate neural correlates of internal consistency in complex decision-making. Method Sixteen individuals with focal vmPFC lesions, 16 brain-damage comparison individuals, and 16 normal comparison individuals completed a three-option forced-choice preference task in which choices were made using attribute sets. Participants also completed visual-analogue preference ratings to indicate how much they liked each option, and rated the influence of each attribute on their decision-making. Options were either social (potential spouses) or non-social (potential houses). Internal consistency for a trial was defined as agreement between the choice and the most positively rated option. Results A mixed design ANOVA revealed that internal consistency between choices and preferences derived from summed attribute ratings was significantly lower for the vmPFC group relative to comparison participants, but only in the social condition (pη2 = .09), 95% CI [.002, .163]. Conclusions Internal consistency during social decisions may be deficient in patients with vmPFC damage, leading to a discrepancy between preferences and choices. The vmPFC may provide an important neural mechanism for aligning behavioral choices with expressed preferences.

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