An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment

Greene, Joshua D.; Sommerville, R. Brian; Nystrom, Leigh E.; Darley, John M.; Cohen, Jonathan D.

doi:10.1126/science.1062872

Cited by 3,637 publications

(3,912 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…One recent study on logical reasoning demonstrated activation in VMPFC when the logical response was overcome by belief bias (i.e., when subjects responded on the basis of personal beliefs rather than the logic of the situation) (Goel and Dolan, 2003). A study involving moral personal, moral impersonal, and nonmoral judgments has shown greater activation of MPFC in the moral personal condition compared to the other conditions (Greene et al, 2001). 3 Our results are also consistent with neuroanatomical evidence.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…One possible basis for this connection is an interaction between L/DLPFC and VMPFC during reasoning. While several neuroimaging and patient studies have shown a dissociation between L/DLPFC and VMPFC in cognitive and affective processing (Goel and Dolan, 2001a;Greene et al, 2001;Hariri et al, 2000;Koechlin et al, 2000;Stuss and Levine, 2002), a predicted interaction be-tween L/DLPFC and VMPFC in reasoning tasks, as a function of emotional saliency, remains to be demonstrated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Reciprocal neural response within lateral and ventral medial prefrontal cortex during hot and cold reasoning

2003

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Logic is widely considered the basis of rationality. Logical choices, however, are often influenced by emotional responses, sometimes to our detriment, sometimes to our advantage. To understand the neural basis of emotionally neutral ("cold") and emotionally salient ("hot") reasoning we studied 19 volunteers using event-related fMRI, as they made logical judgments about arguments that varied in emotional saliency. Despite identical logical form and content categories across "hot" and "cold" reasoning conditions, lateral and ventral medial prefrontal cortex showed reciprocal response patterns as a function of emotional saliency of content. "Cold" reasoning trials resulted in enhanced activity in lateral/dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (L/DLPFC) and suppression of activity in ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). By contrast, "hot" reasoning trials resulted in enhanced activation in VMPFC and suppression of activation in L/DLPFC. This reciprocal engagement of L/DLPFC and VMPFC provides evidence for a dynamic neural system for reasoning, the configuration of which is strongly influenced by emotional saliency.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Reciprocal neural response within lateral and ventral medial prefrontal cortex during hot and cold reasoning

2003

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“…For example, based on our low-level non-conceptual feelings about a certain action event we might modify our normative judgments, e.g. when being personally involved we might come to a normative judgment that is mainly carried by emotional involvement, but not by rational argument (Greene & Haidt, 2002;Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001); or when lacking the capacity of emotionally assessing an action effect (e.g. due to a brain disease), we are impaired in forming out moral judgments (Damasio, 2003).…”

Section: General Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

I move, therefore I am: A new theoretical framework to investigate agency and ownership

Synofzik

Vosgerau

Newen

2008

Consciousness and Cognition

234

183

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a b s t r a c tThe neurocognitive structure of the acting self has recently been widely studied, yet is still perplexing and remains an often confounded issue in cognitive neuroscience, psychopathology and philosophy. We provide a new systematic account of two of its main features, the sense of agency and the sense of ownership, demonstrating that although both features appear as phenomenally uniform, they each in fact are complex crossmodal phenomena of largely heterogeneous functional and (self-)representational levels. These levels can be arranged within a gradually evolving, onto-and phylogenetically plausible framework which proceeds from basic non-conceptual sensorimotor processes to more complex conceptual and meta-representational processes of agency and ownership, respectively. In particular, three fundamental levels of agency and ownership processing have to be distinguished: The level of feeling, thinking and social interaction. This naturalistic account will not only allow to ''ground the self in action", but also provide an empirically testable taxonomy for cognitive neuroscience and a new tool for disentangling agency and ownership disturbances in psychopathology (e.g. alien hand, anarchic hand, anosognosia for one's own hemiparesis).

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“…In the human brain, these areas include the posterior cingulate cortex, retrosplenial cortex, lateral parietal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, superior frontal gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, and the cerebellar tonsils (Fox et al, 2005). In humans, heightened default system activity has been linked to complex cognitive processes, such as theory of mind (Saxe and Kanwisher, 2003), moral reasoning (Greene et al, 2001), active self-referential behavior (Vogeley and Fink, 2003), recollection (Wagner et al, 2005) and imagining the future (Addis et al, 2007). Recently, Vincent and colleagues (2007) demonstrated with fMRI that many elements of this default system are present in the anesthetized macaque monkey brain.…”

Section: Neonatal Amygdala Lesions and Resting Brain Metabolismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of neonatal amygdala or hippocampus lesions on resting brain metabolism in the macaque monkey: A microPET imaging study

et al. 2008

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Longitudinal analysis of animals with neonatal brain lesions enables the evaluation of behavioral changes during multiple stages of development. Interpretation of such changes, however, carries the caveat that permanent neural injury also yields morphological and neurochemical reorganization elsewhere in the brain that may lead either to functional compensation or to exacerbation of behavioral alterations. We have measured the long-term effects of selective neonatal brain damage on resting cerebral glucose metabolism in nonhuman primates. Sixteen rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) received neurotoxic lesions of either the amygdala (n = 8) or hippocampus (n = 8) when they were 2-weeks-old. Four years later, these animals, along with age-and experience-matched sham-operated control animals (n = 8), were studied with high-resolution positron emission tomography (microPET) and 2-deoxy-2[ 18 F]fluoro-D-glucose ([ 18 F]FDG) to detect areas of altered metabolism. The groups were compared using an anatomically-based region of interest analysis. Relative to controls, amygdala-lesioned animals displayed hypometabolism in three frontal lobe regions, as well as in the neostriatum and hippocampus. Hypermetabolism was also evident in the cerebellum of amygdala-lesioned animals. Hippocampal-lesioned animals only showed hypometabolism in the retrosplenial cortex. These results indicate that neonatal amygdala and hippocampus lesions induce very different patterns of long-lasting metabolic changes in distant brain regions. These observations raise the possibility that behavioral alterations in animals with neonatal lesions may be due to the intended damage, to consequent brain reorganization or to a combination of both factors.The study of neurodevelopmental disorders within a clinical setting is inherently complex since each patient's specific behavioral and cognitive deficits stem from a unique interaction between genetic, neurobiological and environmental factors. Longitudinal analysis of animal models provides a complementary approach, since genetic, neurobiological and environmental factors * Corresponding Author: David G. Amaral, Ph.D., The M.I.N.D. Institute, University of California, Davis, 2825 50 th Street, Sacramento, CA 95817,, Email: dgamaral@ucdavis.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptNeuroimage. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2009 January 15. Published in final edited form as:Neuroimage. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript can be selectively manipulated and tightly controlle...

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An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment

Cited by 3,637 publications

References 9 publications

Reciprocal neural response within lateral and ventral medial prefrontal cortex during hot and cold reasoning

Reciprocal neural response within lateral and ventral medial prefrontal cortex during hot and cold reasoning

I move, therefore I am: A new theoretical framework to investigate agency and ownership

Effects of neonatal amygdala or hippocampus lesions on resting brain metabolism in the macaque monkey: A microPET imaging study

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