Different influences of moral violation with and without physical impurity on face processing: An event-related potentials study

Abstract

It has been widely accepted that moral violations that involve impurity (such as spitting in public) induce the emotion of disgust, but there has been a debate about whether moral violations that do not involve impurity (such as swearing in public) also induce the same emotion. The answer to this question may have implication for understanding where morality comes from and how people make moral judgments. This study aimed to compared the neural mechanisms underlying two kinds of moral violation by using an affective priming task to test the effect of sentences depicting moral violation behaviors with and without physical impurity on subsequent detection of disgusted faces in a visual search task. After reading each sentence, participants completed the face search task. Behavioral and electrophysiological (event-related potential, or ERP) indices of affective priming (P2, N400, LPP) and attention allocation (N2pc) were analyzed. Results of behavioral data and ERP data showed that moral violations both with and without impurity promoted the detection of disgusted faces (RT, N2pc); moral violations without impurity impeded the detection of neutral faces (N400). No priming effect was found on P2 and LPP. The results suggest both types of moral violation influenced the processing of disgusted faces and neutral faces, but the neural activity with temporal characteristics was different.

Effects of Core Disgust and Moral Disgust on Moral Judgment: An Event-Related Potential Study

“…Previous behavioral studies showed that people tend to make more strictly moral judgments in the non-purity domain and judge the purity domain to be more moral ( Landy and Goodwin, 2015 ; Olatunji et al, 2016 ). The imaging and electrophysiological studies also showed that the processing of purity-based moral judgment was different from that in other domains ( Dungan and Young, 2019 ; Jiang et al, 2020 ). So far, numerous empirical studies have formed two competing hypotheses ( Wagemans et al, 2018 ).…”

“…The priming stimuli referred to core disgust (e.g., feces) and moral disgust (e.g., incest). Based on previous work ( Landy and Goodwin, 2015 ; Olatunji et al, 2016 ; Jiang et al, 2020 ), we predicted that, in terms of behavior, disgust priming could not judge the immoral behaviors more harshly, but it may make judgments in the non-purity domain more strictly. Purity and non-purity moral processing would induce different ERP components, especially some later ERP components, such as the N450 and LPP, representing conflict detection and resolution ( McCleery et al, 2011 ), might help distinguish them.…”

“…The early and late ERP components can stand for different processes in the previous electrophysiological studies. A series of ERP studies have shown that moral judgment can induce the P2 and N2, which are closely related to early automatic processing, and the frontal and parietal LPPs are related to the later controlled and elaborative stages of moral processing ( Yoder and Decety, 2014 ; Jiang et al, 2020 ). These components we discussed above represent cognitive reasoning and intuitive emotion processes in moral judgment ( White et al, 2017 ; Yoder et al, 2021 ).…”

Keeping Morality “on the Straight” and Never “on the Bend”: Metaphorical Representations of Moral Concepts in Straightness and Curvature

“…The bidirectional representational relationship between moral concepts and physical attributes shows that impurities causing core disgust, such as dirt and stink, can affect behavior and spatial dimensions of moral judgment. For example, research showed that both moral violations involving and not involving impurity promoted the detection of disgusted faces [ 34 ], and moral violations with impurity cues elicited a higher severity of moral judgments than those without impurity cues [ 35 ]. However, this relationship was modulated by the degree of core disgust priming; one study had found that moral severity ratings for moral transgressions after the presentation of neutral images were significantly higher than those after the presentation of highly disgusting images [ 36 ].…”

The Difference in Brain Processing Between Animate and Inanimate Beings in Moral Violation: An Electrophysiological Evidence

“…Moral violation is described as behavior against social norms that are often judged by the society 1 and linked with three main schools of thoughts that tackle the concept of moral judgment: (i) Piaget's moral cognitive development model, (ii) social intuitionist model and (iii) dual-processing theory. 2 Social intuitionist model and dual -processing theory focus on moral emotions such as anger and disgust that influences moral judgment. 2,3,4 It is commonly hypothesized that the perception of moral violation evokes strong emotion.…”