Moral Cognition About Harm in Anxiety Disorders: The Importance of Experienced Emotion

Abstract

Recent work has shown that emotional arousal influences decision-making in sacrificial moral dilemmas, with heightened levels of arousal associated with increased aversion to committing moral transgressions to maximize utilitarian outcomes. Patients with anxiety disorders experience pathologically heightened states of arousal and thus may be expected to exhibit reduced utilitarian responding on such dilemmas. Extant evidence has been mixed, however, regarding whether anxious patients differ in their moral decisions from controls, and no study has conducted a careful examination of emotions experienced during decision-making. We administered sacrificial moral dilemmas to a cohort of 95 patients from across the spectrum of anxiety disorders to test whether they differed from matched controls on a) utilitarian decision-making, and b) ratings of experienced emotion during the moral deliberative process. Results showed no group differences between patients and controls on endorsement of utilitarian sacrificial action or on reported experience of emotionality during the experiment. Additionally, exploratory analysis revealed that specific emotions were correlated with utilitarian judgments. These results are in line with the Dual Process Theory model’s prediction that decreased utilitarian responding will be concomitant with an increased emotional arousal. Our findings support past work indicating that moral cognition is intact in anxiety disorders despite the emotional dysregulation characteristic of anxious psychopathology. Future work would benefit from the use of process-dissociation techniques to further clarify whether emotional or cognitive processes may differ in anxiety disorders during moral cognition.

Meanness trumps language: Lack of foreign language effect in early bilinguals’ moral choices

“…Surprisingly, neither psychopathic traits nor arousal predicted the amount of time consumed before responding to the moral dilemmas, and as stated above, arousal did not modulate the effect of other predictors, such as personal force, avoidability, and benefit recipient. These variables have been shown to have an important effect on moral choices and could be interacting with participant’s assessments of the dilemmas, which also play a role in the decision [ 11 , 46 , 65 ].…”

Psychopathy and Moral-Dilemma Judgment: An Analysis Using the Four-Factor Model of Psychopathy and the CNI Model of Moral Decision-Making

“…More generally, the current study builds on a growing body of research in clinical psychology examining relations between moral-dilemma judgments and different psychological disorders. By using the CNI approach, our work illustrates the value of disentangling the determinants underlying moral-dilemma judgments, which may also provide more nuanced insights into the nature of other psychological disorders (Patil et al, 2020). For example, research using the traditional approach suggests that preference for utilitarian judgments over deontological judgments is positively related to alexithymia (e.g., Gleichgerrcht et al, 2015; Patil et al, 2016; Patil & Silani, 2014) and to manic and depressive states in bipolar disorder (e.g., Gago et al, 2019; Kim et al, 2015).…”

“…Although these relations might reflect a common deficit in moral judgments across disorders, it is also possible that the obtained associations are driven by distinct determinants of moral-dilemma judgments, which are concealed in the traditional approach. Relatedly, research that used the traditional approach has provided mixed evidence for relations between preference for utilitarian judgments over deontological judgments and anxiety-related disorders (e.g., Patil et al, 2020; Whitton et al, 2014), schizophrenia (e.g., de Achával et al, 2013; Koelkebeck et al, 2018; McGuire et al, 2017), and autism spectrum disorder (Dempsey et al, 2020; Gleichgerrcht et al, 2013; Patil et al, 2016). Although the mixed findings regarding these disorders may suggest that they are not reliably associated with differences in moral-dilemma judgments, it is also possible that these disorders show a complex pattern of differences with multiple determinants of moral-dilemma judgments.…”