Morality Cognition Reviewsⅰ Studies/Neuroscience
▶ talk
The VMPFC and morality⊙ Bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) -> increases ‘utilitarian’ choices in moral dilemmas (i.e. judgments favoring the aggregate welfare > over the welfare of fewer individuals) [link]Koenigs, Young and colleagues
: normal moral judgment springs from a complex interaction of cognitive and emotional mechanisms relying on specific neural structures.
METHODS
▶ [Gr. 1]six patients with bilateral VMPFC damage on moral decision-making tasks was compared with that of patients with [Gr. 2]other brain lesions and with [Gr. 3]neurologically normal controls.
▶ Moral scenarios for task:
*in ‘Personal’ scenarios, YES -> highly aversive moral violation
(i) ‘high conflict’ emotionally salient ‘personal’ moral scenarios (e.g. pushing a bulky stranger onto the track of a runaway trolley to save the lives of five workmen, thus killing the stranger)
(ii) ‘low-conflict’ emotionally salient ‘personal’ scenarios (e.g. hiring a man to rape your wife while you’re away so that you can comfort her and conquer her love again)
(iii) less emotionally salient, ‘impersonal’ scenarios (e.g. lying to a guard to borrow a speedboat and warn tourists of an impending storm)
(iv) non-moral scenarios (e.g. take the train instead of the bus to arrive in time).
RESULTS
▶ VMPFC patients and controls unanimously responded ‘no’ to the low-conflict ‘personal’ scenarios.
▶ However, VMPFC patients endorsed ‘utilitarian’ decisions in high-conflict scenarios (overcome highly emotionally aversive) much more often than control subjects did.
DISCUSSION
▶ This study provides a direct link between damage to a circumscribed brain region and a change in preferences to emotionally salient moral judgments, a dissociation within the moral judgment domain.
⊙ Early damage to the VMPFC (which often extends to the frontopolar cortex [FPC, Brodmann's area (BA) 10]) -> severe impairments of both moral behavior and reasoning: suggesting that these prefrontal regions are crucially important in moral learning [link].
Tasks : from the active moral judgments and passive exposure to morally salient stimuli
Functional imaging studies -> role of the VMPFC and FPC in moral reasoning and moral emotions in normal adults ([image link][link 1, 2])
▶ VMPFC–FPC activations occurred together with activations in the anterior temporal cortex, superior temporal sulcus region and limbic structures, leading to the concept of the ‘moral brain’ as a network of closely interconnected regions -> that integrates the diverse functions involved in moral appraisals [link].
Reason and emotion in moral judgement
The increased preference of VMPFC–FPC patients for utilitarian choices can be interpreted according to different functional–anatomic hypotheses.
H1> EMOTIONAL BLUNTING: simple dissociation hypothesis
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H2> CONFLICT: the dual-process hypothesis
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H3> INTEGRATIONThe VMPFC–FPC might be necessary for the experience of prosocial moral sentiments.
It has been proposed that these complex feelings emerge from integration between emotional and cognitive mechanisms (instead of conflict).
-> The experience of compassion and empathic concern, for example, requires the engagement of limbic-mediated emotional states (e.g. sadness or attachment) in conjunction with mechanisms mediated by the FPC (prospective thinking and representing multiple outcomes of events and actions (e.g. forecasting the consequences of our own acts onto others)) [Link]
-> [fMRI studies] VMPFC-FPC consistently engaged in explicit moral judgments and passive presentation of stimuli evocative of moral emotions (even in the absence of cognitive conflict or typical executive processes [Link 1, 2]).
J.Moll suggests that prosocial moral emotions might rely strongly on
1) medial fronto-limbic networks [Figure e], with 2) lateral sectors of the DLPFC and 3) orbitofrontal cortex - being more important for self-centered and other-aversive emotional experience (e.g. anger, frustration or moral disgust) [link 1, 2, 3].
This hypothesis explains
1) why VMPFC patients are ‘more rational’ when judging ‘personal’ moral dilemmas [link](They may think that's good for me)
2) but more emotional in the Ultimatum game [link](They may think that's bad for me)
3) and is in line with the decreased empathic concern and guilt of the patients reported by Koenigs et al. [link].
본 글은 Moral judgments, emotions and the utilitarian brain
J Moll, R de Oliveira-Souza - Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2007 를 정리한 내용임.
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