Valence of emotions and moral decision-making: increased pleasantness to pleasant images and decreased unpleasantness to unpleasant images are associated with utilitarian choices in healthy adults

Martina Carmona-Perera,Miguel Pérez-García,Antonio Verdejo-García,Celia Martí-García

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00626

Abstract

Moral decision-making is a key asset for humans’ integration in social contexts, and the way we decide about moral issues seems to be strongly influenced by emotions. For example, individuals with deficits in emotional processing tend to deliver more utilitarian choices (accepting an emotionally aversive action in favor of communitarian well-being). However, little is known about the association between emotional experience and moral-related patterns of choice. We investigated whether subjective reactivity to emotional stimuli, in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance, is associated with moral decision-making in 95 healthy adults. They answered to a set of moral and non-moral dilemmas and assessed emotional experience in valence, arousal and dominance dimensions in response to neutral, pleasant, unpleasant non-moral, and unpleasant moral pictures. Results showed significant correlations between less unpleasantness to negative stimuli, more pleasantness to positive stimuli and higher proportion of utilitarian choices. We also found a positive association between higher arousal ratings to negative moral laden pictures and more utilitarian choices. Low dominance was associated with greater perceived difficulty over moral judgment. These behavioral results are in fitting with the proposed role of emotional experience in moral choice.

Highlights

Moral decision-making is an essential asset for humans’ integration in social contexts
We examined whether individual differences in subjective reactivity to affective stimuli is associated with moral decisionmaking in healthy adults, and whether individual variations in the valence, arousal and dominance subjective emotional ratings are associated with specific utilitarian vs. deontological choice patterns
The final 32-item Spanish version has demonstrated adequate psychometric properties (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.78, Spearman Brown coefficient = 0.76; Carmona-Perera et al, under review). This task is composed by eight non-moral dilemmas involving a rational decision without moral content, and 24 moral dilemmas which concern the appropriateness of moral violations for a higher benefit

Summary

Introduction

Moral decision-making is an essential asset for humans’ integration in social contexts. Individuals with ventromedial prefrontal dysfunction (by virtue of psychopathology or brain lesions) and emotion processing deficits are typically more prone to endorse utilitarian choices, which maximize the aggregate welfare at the expense of the emotional implications of harming an innocent person (Greene et al, 2001; Koenigs et al, 2007; Carmona-Perera et al, 2012; Young et al, 2012). Recent studies have demonstrated that transient manipulation of specific emotions can bias moral decision-making toward utilitarian or deontological choices in response to moral dilemmas. Several studies have demonstrated that the induction of positively valenced emotions (e.g., happiness, humorous) favors the tendency to endorse utilitarian choices, whereas the induction of negatively valenced emotions (e.g, sadness, disgust) favors

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