The physiological basis of psychological disgust and moral judgments.

To address ongoing debates about whether feelings of disgust are causally related to moral judgments, we pharmacologically inhibited spontaneous disgust responses to moral infractions and examined effects on moral thinking. Findings demonstrated, first, that the antiemetic ginger (Zingiber officinale), known to inhibit nausea, reduces feelings of disgust toward nonmoral purity-offending stimuli (e.g., bodily fluids), providing the first experimental evidence that disgust is causally rooted in physiological nausea (Study 1). Second, this same physiological experience was causally related to moral thinking: ginger reduced the severity of judgments toward purity-based moral violations (Studies 2 and 4) or eliminated the tendency for people higher in bodily sensation awareness to make harsher moral judgments than those low in this dispositional tendency (Study 3). In all studies, effects were restricted to moderately severe purity-offending stimuli, consistent with preregistered predictions. Together, findings provide the first evidence that psychological disgust can be disrupted by an antiemetic and that doing so has consequences for moral judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Feeling out a link between feeling and infant sociomoral evaluation.

Recent research has shown that infants selectively approach prosocial versus antisocial characters, suggesting that foundations of sociomoral development may be present early in life. Despite this, to date, the mental processes involved in infants' prosocial preferences are poorly understood. To explore a possible role of emotions in early social evaluations, the current studies examined whether four samples of infants and toddlers express different emotional reactions after observing prosocial (giving) versus antisocial (taking) events. Experimentally blind coders rated infants' and toddlers' emotional reactions to prosocial and antisocial interactions from video using a 1- to 7-point Likert scale of negative to positive emotion; reactions were rated as more positive after viewing prosocial compared to antisocial interactions in three of four samples. While the observed effects were small, a single-paper meta-analysis suggests that the findings are robust and stable across age. These results support the possibility that emotional reactions play some role in infants' sociomoral evaluations. Statement of contribution What is already known Infants prefer prosocial to antisocial individuals from the first year of life. Emotion plays some role in the sociomoral judgments of children and adults. What this study adds Infants and toddlers express more positive reactions after observing prosocial giving versus antisocial taking acts, though observed effect sizes are small. Naïve coders can predict at a better than chance rate what type of act an infant or toddler just viewed based on their facial expressions. Provides the first evidence that emotion plays some to-be-specified role in infants' and toddlers' sociomoral evaluations.

Moral judgement by the disconnected left and right cerebral hemispheres: a split-brain investigation.

Owing to the hemispheric isolation resulting from a severed corpus callosum, research on split-brain patients can help elucidate the brain regions necessary and sufficient for moral judgement. Notably, typically developing adults heavily weight the intentions underlying others' moral actions, placing greater importance on valenced intentions versus outcomes when assigning praise and blame. Prioritization of intent in moral judgements may depend on neural activity in the right hemisphere's temporoparietal junction, an area implicated in reasoning about mental states. To date, split-brain research has found that the right hemisphere is necessary for intent-based moral judgement. When testing the left hemisphere using linguistically based moral vignettes, split-brain patients evaluate actions based on outcomes, not intentions. Because the right hemisphere has limited language ability relative to the left, and morality paradigms to date have involved significant linguistic demands, it is currently unknown whether the right hemisphere alone generates intent-based judgements. Here we use nonlinguistic morality plays with split-brain patient J.W. to examine the moral judgements of the disconnected right hemisphere, demonstrating a clear focus on intent. This finding indicates that the right hemisphere is not only necessary but also sufficient for intent-based moral judgement, advancing research into the neural systems supporting the moral sense.

Social evaluation of intentional, truly accidental, and negligently accidental helpers and harmers by 10-month-old infants.

Whereas adults largely base their evaluations of others' actions on others' intentions, a host of research in developmental psychology suggests that younger children privilege outcome over intention, leading them to condemn accidental harm. To date, this question has been examined only with children capable of language production. In the current studies, we utilized a non-linguistic puppet show paradigm to examine the evaluation of intentional and accidental acts of helping or harming in 10-month-old infants. In Experiment 1 (n=64), infants preferred intentional over accidental helpers but accidental over intentional harmers, suggestive that by this age infants incorporate information about others' intentions into their social evaluations. In Experiment 2 (n=64), infants did not distinguish "negligently" accidental from intentional helpers or harmers, suggestive that infants may find negligent accidents somewhat intentional. In Experiment 3 (n=64), we found that infants preferred truly accidental over negligently accidental harmers, but did not reliably distinguish negligently accidental from truly accidental helpers, consistent with past work with adults and children suggestive that humans are particularly sensitive to negligently accidental harm. Together, these results imply that infants engage in intention-based social evaluation of those who help and harm accidentally, so long as those accidents do not stem from negligence.

The limits of early social evaluation: 9-month-olds fail to generate social evaluations of individuals who behave inconsistently.

Infant studies examining the development of the ability to evaluate others for their pro- and antisocial acts to date have explored how infants evaluate individuals who are either consistently prosocial or consistently antisocial. Yet in the real world, one regularly encounters individuals who behave inconsistently, engaging in multiple different kinds of behaviors that are variably prosocial and antisocial. In order to form accurate social evaluations of these inconsistently helpful and harmful individuals, then, evaluators must be able to aggregate across different types of behaviors and update previously formed evaluations based on new information. The current studies were designed to examine 9-month-old infants' social evaluations of characters who have displayed both prosocial and antisocial acts. Across three experiments using a previously utilized scenario for testing infants' preference for prosocial over antisocial others, infants repeatedly failed to prefer more- versus less-prosocial individuals when one of those individuals had previously acted both prosocially and antisocially, despite various attempts to facilitate responding across experiments. Notably, an additional experiment replicated infants' preference for consistently prosocial over consistently antisocial others. Together, findings from the current studies suggest that incorporating behavioral inconsistency into one's social evaluations may be especially difficult for infants in the first year.

The jingle and jangle of emotion assessment: Imprecise measurement, casual scale usage, and conceptual fuzziness in emotion research.

Although affective science has seen an explosion of interest in measuring subjectively experienced distinct emotional states, most existing self-report measures tap broad affect dimensions and dispositional emotional tendencies, rather than momentary distinct emotions. This raises the question of how emotion researchers are measuring momentary distinct emotions in their studies. To address this question, we reviewed the self-report measurement practices regularly used for the purpose of assessing momentary distinct emotions, by coding these practices as observed in a representative sample of articles published in Emotion from 2001-2011 (n = 467 articles; 751 studies; 356 measurement instances). This quantitative review produced several noteworthy findings. First, researchers assess many purportedly distinct emotions (n = 65), a number that differs substantially from previously developed emotion taxonomies. Second, researchers frequently use scales that were not systematically developed, and that include items also used to measure at least 1 other emotion on a separate scale in a separate study. Third, the majority of scales used include only a single item, and had unknown reliability. Together, these tactics may create ambiguity regarding which emotions are being measured in empirical studies, and conceptual inconsistency among measures of purportedly identical emotions across studies. We discuss the implications of these problematic practices, and conclude with recommendations for how the field might improve the way it measures emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record