Excluded but not alone. Does social exclusion prevent the occurrence of a Joint Simon Effect (JSE)?

The Joint Simon Effect (JSE) is known to reflect the natural and spontaneous tendency to integrate actions from another individual into our own action system during joint action. This tendency to co-represent others' actions positively correlates with the dispositional tendency to take others' perspective. However, a quick episode of social exclusion has been shown to erase the tendency to co-represent others' actions. From a theoretical viewpoint, excluded individuals should still show signs of co-representation as ostracism tends to increase attention paid to others and Perspective Taking. In this context, this study challenges the idea that social exclusion eliminates all forms of co-representation (or JSE) by using an in-person version of the Task. We also intend to replicate findings on a positive link between Perspective Taking and the size of the JSE. To this end, participants played either an inclusive or exclusive version of the Cyberball game, then performed a joint go-nogo Simon Task. Perspective Taking was measured by using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. By contrast to previous results, our results revealed that excluded individuals co-represented others' actions as much as included ones. However, a positive correlation between Perspective Taking and the JSE was limited to included participants. We discuss these findings in terms of methodological differences and in the light of the social exclusion literature.

The Effect of Cognitive Load on Intent-Based Moral Judgment.

When making a moral judgment, people largely care about two factors: Who did it (causal responsibility), and did they intend to (intention)? Since Piaget's seminal studies, we have known that as children mature, they gradually place greater emphasis on intention, and less on mere bad outcomes, when making moral judgments. Today, we know that this developmental shift has several signature properties. Recently, it has been shown that when adults make moral judgments under cognitive load, they exhibit a pattern similar to young children; that is, their judgments become notably more outcome based. Here, we show that all of the same signature properties that accompany the outcome-to-intent shift in childhood characterize the "intent-to-outcome" shift obtained under cognitive load in adults. These findings hold important implications for current theories of moral judgment.

Anticipation of guilt for everyday moral transgressions: The role of the anterior insula and the influence of interpersonal psychopathic traits.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterised by atypical moral behaviour likely rooted in atypical affective/motivational processing, as opposed to an inability to judge the wrongness of an action. Guilt is a moral emotion believed to play a crucial role in adherence to moral and social norms, but the mechanisms by which guilt (or lack thereof) may influence behaviour in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits are unclear. We measured neural responses during the anticipation of guilt about committing potential everyday moral transgressions, and tested the extent to which these varied with psychopathic traits. We found a significant interaction between the degree to which anticipated guilt was modulated in the anterior insula and interpersonal psychopathic traits: anterior insula modulation of anticipated guilt was weaker in individuals with higher levels of these traits. Data from a second sample confirmed that this pattern of findings was specific to the modulation of anticipated guilt and not related to the perceived wrongness of the transgression. These results suggest a central role for the anterior insula in coding the anticipation of guilt regarding potential moral transgressions and advance our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms that may underlie propensity to antisocial behaviour.

Why (and how) should we study the interplay between emotional arousal, Theory of Mind, and inhibitory control to understand moral cognition?

Findings in the field of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience have shed new light on our understanding of the psychological and biological bases of morality. Although a lot of attention has been devoted to understanding the processes that underlie complex moral dilemmas, attempts to represent the way in which individuals generate moral judgments when processing basic harmful actions are rare. Here, we will outline a model of morality which proposes that the evaluation of basic harmful actions relies on complex interactions between emotional arousal, Theory of Mind (ToM) capacities, and inhibitory control resources. This model makes clear predictions regarding the cognitive processes underlying the development of and ability to generate moral judgments. We draw on data from developmental and cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopathology research to evaluate the model and propose several conceptual and methodological improvements that are needed to further advance our understanding of moral cognition and its development.

Priming Children's Use of Intentions in Moral Judgement with Metacognitive Training.

Typically, adults give a primary role to the agent's intention to harm when performing a moral judgment of accidental harm. By contrast, children often focus on outcomes, underestimating the actor's mental states when judging someone for his action, and rely on what we suppose to be intuitive and emotional processes. The present study explored the processes involved in the development of the capacity to integrate agents' intentions into their moral judgment of accidental harm in 5 to 8-year-old children. This was done by the use of different metacognitive trainings reinforcing different abilities involved in moral judgments (mentalising abilities, executive abilities, or no reinforcement), similar to a paradigm previously used in the field of deductive logic. Children's moral judgments were gathered before and after the training with non-verbal cartoons depicting agents whose actions differed only based on their causal role or their intention to harm. We demonstrated that a metacognitive training could induce an important shift in children's moral abilities, showing that only children who were explicitly instructed to "not focus too much" on the consequences of accidental harm, preferentially weighted the agents' intentions in their moral judgments. Our findings confirm that children between the ages of 5 and 8 are sensitive to the intention of agents, however, at that age, this ability is insufficient in order to give a "mature" moral judgment. Our experiment is the first that suggests the critical role of inhibitory resources in processing accidental harm.

Friend or foe? Early social evaluation of human interactions.

We report evidence that 29-month-old toddlers and 10-month-old preverbal infants discriminate between two agents: a pro-social agent, who performs a positive (comforting) action on a human patient and a negative (harmful) action on an inanimate object, and an anti-social agent, who does the converse. The evidence shows that they prefer the former to the latter even though the agents perform the same bodily movements. Given that humans can cause physical harm to their conspecifics, we discuss this finding in light of the likely adaptive value of the ability to detect harmful human agents.

The role of causal and intentional judgments in moral reasoning in individuals with high functioning autism.

In the present study, we investigated the ability to assign moral responsibility and punishment in adults with high functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome (HFA/AS), using non-verbal cartoons depicting an aggression, an accidental harm or a mere coincidence. Participants were asked to evaluate the agent's causal and intentional roles, his responsibility and the punishment he deserves for his action. Adults with HFA/AS did not differ in judgments of suffering and causality from adults with typical development. However, subtle difficulties with judgments of intentional action and moral judgments were observed in participants with HFA/AS. These results are discussed in the light of emerging studies that deal with integrity of moral reasoning in individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

A non-mentalistic cause-based heuristic in human social evaluations.

In situations where an agent unintentionally causes harm to a victim, the agent's (harmless) intention typically carries more weight than his/her (harmful) causal role. Therefore, healthy adults typically judge leniently agents responsible for an accident. Using animated cartoons, we show, however, that in the presence of a difficult concurrent task, this result is reversed: the agent's harmless intention is given less weight than her harmful causal role, inducing participants to judge harshly the accidental agent. This was found even though cognitive load did not selectively impair the detection of intentions over causal roles. Not only is this finding evidence that the social/moral evaluation system relies on two dissociable components, but it also demonstrates that these components are asymmetrical, the causal component being more intuitive than the intentional component, and the full integration of the two requiring central cognitive resources.

Moral judgment in adults with autism spectrum disorders.

The ability of a group of adults with high functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS) to distinguish moral, conventional and disgust transgressions was investigated using a set of six transgression scenarios, each of which was followed by questions about permissibility, seriousness, authority contingency and justification. The results showed that although individuals with HFA or AS (HFA/AS) were able to distinguish affect-backed norms from conventional affect-neutral norms along the dimensions of permissibility, seriousness and authority-dependence, they failed to distinguish moral and disgust transgressions along the seriousness dimension and were unable to provide appropriate welfare-based moral justifications. Moreover, they judged conventional and disgust transgressions to be more serious than did the comparison group, and the correlation analysis revealed that the seriousness rating was related to their ToM impairment. We concluded that difficulties providing appropriate moral justifications and evaluating the seriousness of transgressions in individuals with HFA/AS may be explained by an impaired cognitive appraisal system that, while responsive to rule violations, fails to use relevant information about the agent's intentions and the affective impact of the action outcome in conscious moral reasoning.