The Role of Emotions in Moral Judgments: Time-resolved evidence from event-related brain potentials

The influence of emotion on moral judgments has become increasingly prominent in recent years. While explicit normative measures are widely used to investigate this relationship, event-related potentials (ERPs) offer the advantage of a preconscious method to visualize the modulation of moral judgments. Based on Gray and Wegners (2009) Dimensional Moral Model, the present study investigated whether the processing of neutral faces is modulated by moral context information. We hypothesized that neutral faces gain emotional valence when presented in a moral context and thus elicit ERP responses comparable to those established for the processing of emotional faces. Participants (N= 26, 13 female) were tested with regard to their implicit (ERPs) and explicit (morality rating) responses to neutral faces, shown in either a morally positive, negative, or neutral context. Higher ERP amplitudes in early (P100, N170) and later (EPN, LPC) processing stages were expected for harmful/helpful scenarios compared to neutral scenarios. Agents and patients were expected to differ for moral compared to neutral scenarios. In the explicit ratings neutral scenarios were expected to differ from moral scenarios. In ERPs, we found indications for an early modulation of moral valence (harmful/helpful) and an interaction of agency and moral valence after 80-120 ms. Later time sequences showed no significant differences. Morally positive and negative scenarios were rated as significantly different from neutral scenarios. Overall, the results indicate that the relationship of emotion and moral judgments can be observed on a preconscious neural level at an early processing stage as well as in explicit judgments.