PURPOSE The aim of the current study was to investigate morality while also investigating frontal lobe function with the goal of studying the relationship between frontal lobe and morality in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy. METHOD A total of 23 right-handed patients with IGE and 25 right-handed healthy participants agreed to participate. Participants made judgments on a series ...

BACKGROUND Preliminary evidence suggests that relative to healthy controls, patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) show deficits on several inter-related social cognitive tasks, including theory of mind, and emotion comprehension. Systematic investigations examining other aspects of social cognition, including moral reasoning, have not been conducted in PTSD stemming from childhood ...

Counterfactual thinking is thinking about a past that did not happen. This is often the case in "if only…" situations, where we wish something had or had not happened. To make a choice in a moral decision-making situation is particularly hard and, therefore, may be often associated with the imagination of a different outcome. The main aim of the present study is to investigate counterfactual th...

Introduction: Converging evidence suggests that both emotional and cognitive processes are critically involved in moral judgment, and may be mediated by discrete parts of the prefrontal cortex. The current study aimed at investigating the mediatory effect of right Frontopolar Cortex (rFPC) on the way that emotions affect moral judgments.  Methods: Six adult patients affected by rFPC and 10 hea...

Adult psychopaths have deficits in emotional processing and inhibitory control, engage in morally inappropriate behavior, and generally fail to distinguish moral from conventional violations. These observations, together with a dominant tradition in the discipline which sees emotional processes as causally necessary for moral judgment, have led to the conclusion that psychopaths lack an underst...

Introduction Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is associated with abnormal emotion recognition and moral processing. Methods We assessed emotion detection, discrimination, matching, selection, and categorization as well as judgments of nonmoral, moral impersonal, moral personal low- and high-conflict scenarios. Results bvFTD patients gave more utilitarian responses on low-c...

Present study examines the effect of incidental haptic sensations on acceptance of utilitarian judgment—seeking greater happiness in exchange for a few victims—under personal and impersonal moral dilemmas. Recently, Nakamura et al. (2014) indicated that physical coldness reduced empathic concern and facilitated utilitarian judgment in personal moral dilemma. It is also shown that tactile sensat...

Bioethics is dominated by an emphasis on rule making and quandary solving. Teaching and research in ethics often focuses upon dramatic, controversial issues at the margins of life and death. Much less attention is given to the relationship between moral reflection and the ethos of place. Medical facilities, however, are moral worlds. To discuss the ethos of place is to focus on the character or...

A substantial body of research supports a dual-process theory of moral judgment, according to which characteristically deontological judgments are driven by automatic emotional responses, while characteristically utilitarian judgments are driven by controlled cognitive processes. This theory was initially supported by neuroimaging and reaction time (RT) data. McGuire et al. have reanalyzed thes...

A substantial body of research supports a dual-process theory of moral judgment, according to which characteristically deontological judgments are driven by automatic emotional responses, while characteristically utilitarian judgments are driven by controlled cognitive processes. This theory was initially supported by neuroimaging and reaction time (RT) data. McGuire et al. have reanalyzed thes...