Does it matter who harmed whom? A cross-cultural study of moral judgments about harm by and to insiders and outsiders.

This cross-cultural study compared judgments of moral wrongness for physical and emotional harm with varying combinations of in-group vs. out-group agents and victims across six countries: the United States of America (N = 937), the United Kingdom (N = 995), Romania (N = 782), Brazil (N = 856), South Korea (N = 1776), and China (N = 1008). Consistent with our hypothesis we found evidence of an insider agent effect, where moral violations committed by outsider agents are generally considered more morally wrong than the same violations done by insider agents. We also found support for an insider victim effect where moral violations that were committed against an insider victim generally were seen as more morally wrong than when the same violations were committed against an outsider, and this effect held across all countries. These findings provide evidence that the insider versus outsider status of agents and victims does affect moral judgments. However, the interactions of these identities with collectivism, psychological closeness, and type of harm (emotional or physical) are more complex than what is suggested by previous literature. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-023-04986-3.

When advisors do not know what is best for advisees: Uncertainty inhibits advice giving.

While seeking advice can be beneficial for advisees, advisors may not always possess the necessary knowledge to provide appropriate guidance. Poor-quality advice can mislead advisees rather than offering assistance. Despite the research interest in advisees, few studies have investigated advisors' psychological and behavioral responses, especially when they faced uncertainty regarding the optimal course of action for advisees. To fill this gap, we developed novel paradigms aiming at manipulating advisors' uncertainty, allowing for a systematic investigation of advisors' behavior, motivation, and emotion. Across four studies, we consistently found that advisors under uncertainty give less advice. Furthermore, we observed that uncertainty modulates advisors' motivation to influence, worry about harm to others, and/or sense of power. The motivation to influence and/or worry about harm to others can mediate the effect of uncertainty on advice giving. Besides, we identified nuanced distinctions in the effects of ambiguity and risk, two distinct types of uncertainty, on advisors' psychological processes. Our findings shed light on advisors' self-monitoring of the quality of their advice, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of advisor-advisee communication from the perspective of advisors.

From gratitude to injustice: Neurocomputational mechanisms of gratitude-induced injustice.

Gratitude shapes individuals' behaviours and impacts the harmony of society. Many previous studies focused on its association with prosocial behaviours. A possibility that gratitude can lead to moral violation has been overlooked until recently. Nevertheless, the neurocognitive mechanisms of gratitude-induced moral violation are still unclear. On the other hand, though neural correlates of the gratitude's formation have been examined, the neural underpinnings of gratitude-induced behaviour remain unknown. For addressing these two overlapped research gaps, we developed novel tasks to investigate how participants who had received voluntary (Gratitude group) or involuntary help (Control group) punished their benefactors' unfairness with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The Gratitude group punished their benefactors less than the Control group. The self-report and computational modelling results demonstrated a crucial role of the boosted protection tendency on behalf of benefactors in the gratitude-induced injustice. The fMRI results showed that activities in the regions associated with mentalizing (temporoparietal junction) and reward processing (ventral medial prefrontal cortex) differed between the groups and were related to the gratitude-induced injustice. They suggest that grateful individuals concern for benefactors' benefits, value chances to interact with benefactors, and refrain from action that perturbs relationship-building (i.e., exert less punishment on benefactors' unfairness), which reveal a dark side of gratitude and enrich the gratitude theory (i.e., the find-bind-remind theory). Our findings provide psychological, computational, and neural accounts of the gratitude-induced behaviour and further the understanding of the nature of gratitude.

Brain activation and adaptation of deception processing during dyadic face-to-face interaction.

Though deception is consistently characterized by the slippery-slope effect, i.e., the escalation of small lies over time, differing interactive situations and interacting processes may influence the trajectories of deception. To explore this influence, we investigated naturalistic face-to-face (FF) and computer-mediated face-blocked (FB) interactions using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Pairs of participants acted as deceivers and receivers in an adapted ultimatum game while brain activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) and temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) was recorded. Comparison of deception in the two types of interactions showed that the FF interactions resulted in more successful deception, as well as acceptance of deception, and prompted more neural activation in the rDLPFC than the FB interactions. We found that the deception magnitude escalated in both FF and FB interactions, but rDLPFC activity during deception diminished over time only in the FF interactions but not in FB interactions, suggesting that the deceivers behaviourally adapted to deception over time in both types of interactions, but the neural adaptation occurred only in the FF interactions. Furthermore, neural adaptation in FF interactions was associated with behavioural switching after deception, indicating that the rDLPFC contributes to deception adaptation and the control of switching between deception and honesty. The FF interactions were also characterized by activity in the rTPJ, which showed an adaptation to deception. These findings highlight the importance of interactive situations in dyadic naturalistic settings for deception and the role of the rDLPFC and rTPJ in the slippery-slope effect in deception.

Early distinction between shame and guilt processing in an interpersonal context.

Shame and guilt have been compared in many behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. However, the time course of shame and guilt processing remains unknown. We conducted an event-related potential (ERP) study to investigate the temporal dynamics of shame and guilt in an interpersonal context. Behaviorally, participants reported "shame" when their wrong advice was correctly rejected by a confederate, whereas reported "guilt" when their wrong advice resulted in economic loss of a confederate. The ERP results showed significant difference between the shame and guilt conditions in the early P2 component (140-220 ms) over the frontal region and the alpha oscillations (240-1000 ms) over the parietal region. No significant difference was found between the shame and guilt conditions in the N2, P3, and theta oscillations. These results supported previous findings that shame compared to guilt involves more self-referential processing, whereas guilt compared to shame involves more empathetic processing, and provided evidence that the distinction between shame and guilt could occur in an early stage.

The effect of shame on anger at others: awareness of the emotion-causing events matters.

Numerous studies have found that shame increases individuals' anger at others. However, according to recent theories about the social function of shame and anger at others, it is possible that shame controls individuals' anger at others in specific conditions. We replicated previous findings that shame increased individuals' anger at others' unfairness, when others were not aware of the individual's experience of shameful events. We also found for the first time that shame controlled or even decreased individuals' anger at others' unfairness, when others were aware of the individual's experience of shameful events. The results were consistent when shame was induced by either a recall paradigm or an imagination paradigm, and in either the ultimatum game or the dictator game. This suggests that shame strategically controls individuals' anger at others to demonstrate that they are willing to benefit others, when facing the risk of social exclusion. Our findings highlight the interpersonal function of shame and deepen the understanding of the relationship between shame and anger at others.

Are Proselfs More Deceptive and Hypocritical? Social Image Concerns in Appearing Fair.

Deception varies across individuals and social contexts. The present research explored how individual difference measured by social value orientations, and situations, affect deception in moral hypocrisy. In two experiments, participants made allocations between themselves and recipients with an opportunity to deceive recipients where recipients cannot reject their allocations. Experiment 1 demonstrated that proselfs were more deceptive and hypocritical than prosocials by lying to be apparently fair, especially when deception was unrevealed. Experiment 2 showed that proselfs were more concerned about social image in deception in moral hypocrisy than prosocials were. They decreased apparent fairness when deception was revealed and evaluated by a third-party reviewer and increased it when deception was evaluated but unrevealed. These results show that prosocials and proselfs differed in pursuing deception and moral hypocrisy social goals and provide implications for decreasing deception and moral hypocrisy.

Resting-state Functional Connectivity and Deception: Exploring Individualized Deceptive Propensity by Machine Learning.

Individuals show marked variability in determining to be honest or deceptive in daily life. A large number of studies have investigated the neural substrates of deception; however, the brain networks contributing to the individual differences in deception remain unclear. In this study, we sought to address this issue by employing a machine-learning approach to predict individuals' deceptive propensity based on the topological properties of whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC). Participants finished the resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) data acquisition, and then, one week later, participated as proposers in a modified ultimatum game in which they spontaneously chose to be honest or deceptive. A linear relevance vector regression (RVR) model was trained and validated to examine the relationship between topological properties of networks of RSFC and actual deceptive behaviors. The machine-learning model sufficiently decoded individual differences in deception using three brain networks based on RSFC, including the executive controlling network (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, middle frontal cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex), the social and mentalizing network (the temporal lobe, temporo-parietal junction, and inferior parietal lobule), and the reward network (putamen and thalamus). These networks have been found to form a signaling cognitive framework of deception by coding the mental states of others and the reward or values of deception or honesty, and integrating this information to make a final decision about being deceptive or honest. These findings suggest the potential of using RSFC as a task-independent neural trait for predicting deceptive propensity, and shed light on using machine-learning approaches in deception detection.

Corrigendum: Stimulating the Right Temporoparietal Junction with tDCS Decreases Deception in Moral Hypocrisy and Unfairness.

[This corrects the article on p. 2033 in vol. 8, PMID: 29218025.].

Object words modulate the activity of the mirror neuron system during action imitation.

Background: Although research has demonstrated that the mirror neuron system (MNS) plays a crucial role in both action imitation and action-related semantic processing, whether action-related words can inversely modulate the MNS activity remains unclear. Methods: Here, three types of task-irrelevant words (body parts, verbs, and manufactured objects) were presented to examine the modulation effect of these words on the MNS activity during action observation and imitation. Twenty-two participants were recruited for the fMRI scanning and remaining data from 19 subjects were reported here. Results: Brain activity results showed that word types elicited different modulation effects over nodes of the MNS (i.e., the right inferior frontal gyrus, premotor cortex, inferior parietal lobule, and STS), especially during the imitation stage. Compared with other word conditions, action imitation following manufactured objects words induced stronger activation in these brain regions during the imitation stage. These results were consistent in both task-dependent and -independent ROI analysis. Conclusion: Our findings thus provide evidence for the unique effect of object words on the MNS during imitation of action, which may also confirm the key role of goal inference in action imitation.

Stimulating the Right Temporoparietal Junction with tDCS Decreases Deception in Moral Hypocrisy and Unfairness.

Self-centered and other-regarding concerns play important roles in decisions of deception. To investigate how these two motivations affect deception in fairness related moral hypocrisy, we modulated the brain activity in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), the key region for decision making involved in self-centered and other-regarding concerns. After receiving brain stimulation with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), participants finished a modified dictator game. In the game, they played as proposers to make allocations between themselves and recipients and had a chance to deceive by misreporting their totals for allocations. Results show that deception in moral hypocrisy was decreased after anodal stimulation than sham and cathodal stimulation, only when participants know that their reported totals (appearing fair) would be revealed to recipients rather than being unrevealed. Anodal stimulation also increased offers to recipients than cathodal stimulation regardless of the revelation of reported totals. These findings suggest that enhancing the activity of rTPJ decreased deception caused by impression management rather than self-deception in moral hypocrisy and unfairness through facilitating other-regarding concerns and weakening non-material self-centered motivations. They provide causal evidence for the role of rTPJ in both other-regarding concerns and non-material self-centered motivations, shedding light on the way to decrease moral hypocrisy.

Self-Punishment Promotes Forgiveness in the Direct and Indirect Reciprocity Contexts.

Most previous studies regarding self-punishment have focused on the correlation between moral emotion and self-punishment. Only a few studies have attempted to understand self-punishment from the perspective of seeking forgiveness, and no study has yet directly tested whether wrongdoers' self-punishment promotes others to forgive the wrongdoers. In three studies, the participants judged the wrongdoers' self-punishment behaviors following an unfair allocation and reported the extent to which they forgave the wrongdoers. The results demonstrated that self-punishment did promote forgiveness in both the direct (Studies 1 and 2) and indirect reciprocity (Study 3) contexts. Consistent with costly signaling theory, the costlier the self-punishment was, the stronger the effect it had on forgiveness. Moreover, communicative self-punishment had a better effect than silent self-punishment when the cost was relatively high in the direct-reciprocity studies. These findings can guide us regarding how to address a damaged relationship via self-punishment when compensation is not feasible or acceptable.

Washing away your sins in the brain: physical cleaning and priming of cleaning recruit different brain networks after moral threat.

The association between moral purity and physical cleanliness has been widely discussed recently. Studies found that moral threat initiates the need of physical cleanliness, but actual physical cleaning and priming of cleaning have inconsistent effects on subsequent attitudes and behaviors. Here, we used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the underlying neural mechanism of actual physical cleaning and priming of cleaning. After recalling moral transgression with strong feelings of guilt and shame, participants either actually cleaned their faces with a wipe or were primed with cleanliness through viewing its pictures. Results showed that actual physical cleaning reduced the spontaneous brain activities in the right insula and MPFC, regions that involved in embodied moral emotion processing, while priming of cleaning decreased activities in the right superior frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus, regions that participated in executive control processing. Additionally, actual physical cleaning also changed functional connectivity between insula/MPFC and emotion related regions, whereas priming of cleaning modified connectivity within both moral and sensorimotor areas. These findings revealed that actual physical cleaning and priming of cleaning led to changes in different brain regions and networks, providing neural evidence for the inconsistent effects of cleanliness on subsequent attitudes and behaviors.

Interpersonal brain synchronization in the right temporo-parietal junction during face-to-face economic exchange.

In daily life, interpersonal interactions are influenced by uncertainty about other people's intentions. Face-to-face (FF) interaction reduces such uncertainty by providing external visible cues such as facial expression or body gestures and facilitates shared intentionality to promote belief of cooperative decisions and actual cooperative behaviors in interaction. However, so far little is known about interpersonal brain synchronization between two people engaged in naturally occurring FF interactions. In this study, we combined an adapted ultimatum game with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning to investigate how FF interaction impacts interpersonal brain synchronization during economic exchange. Pairs of strangers interacted repeatedly either FF or face-blocked (FB), while their activation was simultaneously measured in the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) and the control region, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC). Behaviorally, FF interactions increased shared intentionality between strangers, leading more positive belief of cooperative decisions and more actual gains in the game. FNIRS results indicated increased interpersonal brain synchronizations during FF interactions in rTPJ (but not in rDLPFC) with greater shared intentionality between partners. These results highlighted the importance of rTPJ in collaborative social interactions during FF economic exchange and warrant future research that combines FF interactions with fNIRS hyperscanning to study social brain disorders such as autism.

Language modulates brain activity underlying representation of kinship terms.

Kinship terms have been found to be highly diverse across languages. Here we investigated the brain representation of kinship terms in two distinct populations, native Chinese and Caucasian English speakers, with a five-element kinship identification (FEKI) task. The neuroimaging results showed a common extensive frontal and parietal lobe brain activation pattern for different kinship levels for both Chinese and Caucasian English speakers. Furthermore, Chinese speakers had longer reaction times and elicited more fronto-parietal brain networks activation compared to English speakers in level three (e.g., uncle and nephew) and four (e.g., cousin), including an association between the middle frontal gyrus and superior parietal lobe, which might be associated with higher working memory, attention control, and social distance representation load in Chinese kinship system processing. These results contribute to our understanding of the representation of kinship terms in the two languages.

A cultural look at moral purity: wiping the face clean.

Morality is associated with bodily purity in the custom of many societies. Does that imply moral purity is a universal psychological phenomenon? Empirically, it has never been examined, as all prior experimental data came from Western samples. Theoretically, we suggest the answer is not so straightforward-it depends on the kind of universality under consideration. Combining perspectives from cultural psychology and embodiment, we predict a culture-specific form of moral purification. Specifically, given East Asians' emphasis on the face as a representation of public self-image, we hypothesize that facial purification should have particularly potent moral effects in a face culture. Data show that face-cleaning (but not hands-cleaning) reduces guilt and regret most effectively against a salient East Asian cultural background. It frees East Asians from guilt-driven prosocial behavior. In the wake of their immorality, they find a face-cleaning product especially appealing and spontaneously choose to wipe their face clean. These patterns highlight both culturally variable and universal aspects of moral purification. They further suggest an organizing principle that informs the vigorous debate between embodied and amodal perspectives.

Temporal Dynamics of the Integration of Intention and Outcome in Harmful and Helpful Moral Judgment.

The ability to integrate the moral intention information with the outcome of an action plays a crucial role in mature moral judgment. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies implicated that both prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortices are involved in moral intention and outcome processing. Here, we used the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to investigate the temporal dynamics of the processing of the integration between intention and outcome information in harmful and helpful moral judgment. In two experiments, participants were asked to make moral judgments for agents who produced either negative/neutral outcomes with harmful/neutral intentions (harmful judgment) or positive/neutral outcomes with helpful/neutral intentions (helpful judgment). Significant ERP differences between attempted and successful actions over prefrontal and bilateral temporo-parietal regions were found in both harmful and helpful moral judgment, which suggest a possible time course of the integration processing in the brain, starting from the right temporo-parietal area (N180) to the left temporo-parietal area (N250), then the prefrontal area (FSW) and the right temporo-parietal area (TP450 and TPSW) again. These results highlighted the fast moral intuition reaction and the late integration processing over the right temporo-parietal area.

Dissociable somatotopic representations of Chinese action verbs in the motor and premotor cortex.

The embodied view of language processing holds that language comprehension involves the recruitment of sensorimotor information, as evidenced by the somatotopic representation of action verbs in the motor system. However, this review has not yet been examined in logographic scripts such as Chinese, in which action verbs can provide explicit linguistic cues to the effectors (arm, leg, mouth) that conduct the action (hit, jump, drink). We compared the somatotopic representation of Chinese verbs that contain such effector cues and those that do not. The results showed that uncued verbs elicited similar somatotopic representation in the motor and premotor cortex as found in alphabetic scripts. However, effector-cued verbs demonstrated an inverse somatotopic pattern by showing reduced activation in corresponding motor areas, despite that effector-cued verbs actually are rated higher in imageability than uncued verbs. Our results support the universality of somatotopic representation of action verbs in the motor system.

Eyes are windows to the Chinese soul: evidence from the detection of real and fake smiles.

How do people interpret the meaning of a smile? Previous studies with Westerners have found that both the eyes and the mouth are crucial in identifying and interpreting smiles, yet less is known about Easterners. Here we reported that when asking the Chinese to judge the Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles as either real or fake, their accuracy and sensitivity were negatively correlated with their individualism scores but positively correlated with their collectivism scores. However, such correlations were found only for participants who stated the eyes to be the most useful references, but not for those who favored the mouth. Moreover, participants who favored the eyes were more accurate and sensitive than those who favored the mouth. Our results thus indicate that Chinese who follow the typical Eastern decoding process of using the eyes as diagnostic cues to identify and interpret others' facial expressions and social intentions, are particularly accurate and sensitive, the more they self-report greater collectivistic and lower individualistic values.

Multi-representation of symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical magnitude in Chinese number processing.

Numerical information can be conveyed by either symbolic or nonsymbolic representation. Some symbolic numerals can also be identified as nonsymbolic quantities defined by the number of lines (e.g., I, II, III in Roman and -, =, ≡ in Japanese Kanji and Chinese). Here we report that such multi-representation of magnitude can facilitate the processing of these numerals under certain circumstances. In a magnitude comparison task judging 1 to 9 (except 5) Chinese and Arabic numerals presented at the foveal (at the center) or parafoveal (3° left or right of the center) location, multi-representational small-value Chinese numerals showed a processing advantage over single-representational Arabic numerals and large-value Chinese numerals only in the parafoveal condition, demonstrated by lower error rates and faster reaction times. Further event-related potential (ERP) analysis showed that such a processing advantage was not reflected by traditional ERP components identified in previous studies of number processing, such as N1 or P2p. Instead, the difference was found much later in a N400 component between 300-550 msec over parietal regions, suggesting that those behavioral differences may not be due to early processing of visual identification, but later processing of subitizing or accessing mental number line when lacking attentional resources. These results suggest that there could be three stages of number processing represented separately by the N1, P2p and N400 ERP components. In addition, numerical information can be represented simultaneously by both symbolic and nonsymbolic systems, which will facilitate number processing in certain situations.