Emotion and Cognition in Moral Judgment

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

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Abstract

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by candidate): The proposed research is an investigation of the respective roles of cognition and emotion in moral judgment using fMRI and other measures, building on the work reported on in Greene et al. 2001 (appended). This research has two specific aims, first, to further examine the neural correlates of high- and low-emotion moral judgment and, second, to examine the emotional and cognitive bases for individual and group differences in moral judgment. This work addresses the longstanding issue in moral psychology concerning the nature of the processes that produce moral judgments. The rationalist tradition in moral psychology emphasizes the role of reason while a more recent trend places increased emphasis on emotion. The present line of research aims at a synthesis of these two traditions through the development of a theory of moral psychology that does justice to the rational and emotional aspects of moral judgment while elucidating their relation to one another and to the neural structures that underlie them. While this research is valuable as basic science, it has health implications as well. [unreadable] [unreadable] Patients with frontal damage often evade clinical detection because they have normal "cognitive" function. The moral judgment tasks that are being developed as part of this research have been shown to engage both cognitive and emotional processes in predictable ways, and therefore, if properly refined, may prove to be useful diagnostic tools for the identification of frontal lobe damage and other pathological conditions such as psychopathy that involve imbalances in cognitive-emotional interaction. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]