Moral Reasoning in Psychopaths

Patienten mit der psychischen Störung „Psychopathie“ zeigen ein Muster von emotionaler Abgestumpftheit, Impulsivität und unmoralischem Verhalten. Zur Untersuchung moralischen Urteilens wurden in der vorliegenden Studie alltagsrelevante Konflikte mit moralischem bzw. neutralem Inhalt entwickelt und 12 „psychopathischen“ forensischen Patienten sowie 12 nicht-psychopathischen forensischen Patienten präsentiert. „Psychopathische“ im Vergleich zu nicht-psychopathischen Patienten berichteten signifikant positivere Gefühle bei unmoralischen Entscheidungen als Nicht-Psychopathen. Außerdem wurden in der Gruppe der „Psychopathen“ im Vergleich zu den Nicht-Psychopathen signifikant häufiger unmoralische Entscheidungen auf moralische Konflikte getroffen. Diese Befunde deuten darauf hin, dass eine Störung der Emotionsverarbeitung ursächlich für dissoziales Verhalten bei „Psychopathen“ sein könnte.Psychopathic patients show a behavioral pattern that is characterized by indifference, impulsivity and antisocial behavior. To investigate moral reasoning we developed conflicts of everyday life with either moral or neutral content. These conflicts were then presented to a group of 12 psychopathic forensic patients as well as to a group of 12 non-psychopathic forensic patients.Psychopathic compared to non-psychopathic patients reported significantly higher positive feelings when choosing an immoral response alternative than non-psychopaths. Furthermore, psychopaths picked significantly more often an immoral response alternative in the conflicts with moral content than did the non-psychopaths. These results indicate that impairment in emotional processing abilities may be at the core of antisocial behavior in psychopathy

“Why do they do it?”: The short‐story task for measuring fiction‐based mentalizing in autistic and non‐autistic individuals

This study aimed to validate the short-story-task (SST) based on Dodell-Feder et al. as an instrument to quantify the ability of mentalizing and to differentiate between non-autistic adults and autistic adults, who may have acquired rules to interpret the actions of non-autistic individuals. Autistic (N = 32) and non-autistic (N = 32) adult participants were asked to read “The End of Something” by Ernest Hemingway and to answer implicit and explicit mentalizing questions, and comprehension questions. Furthermore, verbal and nonverbal IQ was measured and participants were asked how much fiction they read each month. Mentalizing performance was normally distributed for autistic and non-autistic participants with autistic participants scoring in the lower third of the distribution. ROC (receiver operator curve) analysis revealed the task to be an excellent discriminator between autistic and non-autistic participants. A linear regression analysis identified number of books read, years of education and group as significant predictors. Overall, the SST is a promising measure of mentalizing. On the one hand, it differentiates among non-autistic individuals and on the other hand it is sensitive towards performance differences in mentalizing among autistic adults. Implications for interventions are discussed

An fMRI study on the comparison of different types of false belief reasoning: False belief-based emotion and behavior attribution

False belief (FB) reasoning is a key Theory of Mind (ToM) competence. By 4 years of age, children understand that a person's behavior can be based on a FB about reality. Children cannot understand that a person's emotion can also be based on a FB before the age of six. In order to generate hypothesis on basic processes distinguishing these two types of belief reasoning, the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study in adults directly compares functional activity associated with these two FB tasks. Both tasks were associated with activity in the ToM network including the medial prefrontal cortex and the left temporo-parietal junction. Differential activity was observed in the anterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for FB-based emotion relative to behavior attribution. Contrary to FB behavior attribution, FB-based emotion attribution requires the processing of two different mental states: a belief and an emotion and their relation to each other. The activity pattern may reflect the differential demands on cognitive processes associated with the two different belief-based attribution processes. These results shed new light on the still ongoing debate about the nature of the developmental lag between the two FB tasks

Ongoing neural development of affective theory of mind in adolescence

Affective Theory of Mind (ToM), an important aspect of ToM, involves the understanding of affective mental states. This ability is critical in the developmental phase of adolescence, which is often related with socio-emotional problems. Using a developmentally sensitive behavioral task in combination with functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study investigated the neural development of affective ToM throughout adolescence. Eighteen adolescent (ages 12–14 years) and 18 young adult women (aged 19–25 years) were scanned while evaluating complex affective mental states depicted by actors in video clips. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) showed significantly stronger activation in adolescents in comparison to adults in the affective ToM condition. Current results indicate that the vmPFC might be involved in the development of affective ToM processing in adolescence

Acute psychosocial stress and everyday moral decision-making in young healthy men: The impact of cortisol

In everyday life, moral decisions must frequently be made under acute stress. Although there is increasing evidence that both stress and cortisol affect moral judgment and behavior as well as decision-making in various domains unrelated to morality, surprisingly few attempts have been made to explore the effects of stress on everyday moral decision-making. Therefore, in the present study, we exposed 50 young healthy men to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) or its non-stressful placebo version (PTSST). We investigated the impact of acute stress exposure and stress-related cortisol levels on decision-making, decision certainty, and emotions in 28 everyday moral conflict situations with altruistic versus egoistic response alternatives. Results showed that the TSST-exposed group made more altruistic decisions than the non-stress control group, while groups did not differ in decision certainty and emotion ratings. Moreover, in correlational as well as regression analyses, additionally controlling for confounding variables, we observed significant positive associations between cortisol levels and altruistic decision making. Further analyses revealed that altruistic decisions came along with significantly higher decision certainty and significantly more positive emotion ratings than egoistic decisions. Notably, our data also raise the idea that the personality trait agreeableness plays an important role in everyday moral decision-making. In sum, our findings provide initial evidence that both acute stress exposure and cortisol levels have prosocial effects on everyday moral decision-making in young healthy men. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

False Belief Reasoning in Adults with and without Autistic Spectrum Disorder: Similarities and Differences

A central diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the qualitative impairment in reciprocal social interaction and a prominent hypotheses that tried to explain this impairment is the Theory of Mind (ToM) deficit hypotheses. On a behavioral level the critical test for having a ToM, the understanding of false beliefs (FB), is often used for testing ToM abilities in individuals with ASD. Investigating the neural underpinnings several neuroimaging studies revealed a network of areas involved in FB reasoning in neurotypical individuals. For ASD individuals the neural correlates of false belief processing are largely unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and an adapted unexpected transfer task, that makes it possible to distinguish between the computation of diverging beliefs and the selection of a belief-associated response, we investigated a group of adult high-functioning individuals with ASD (N = 15) and an age and IQ matched group of neurotypical adults (NT; N = 15). On the behavioral level we found no group differences. On the neural level, results were two-fold: In the story phase, in which participants had to compute whether the character's belief is congruent or incongruent to their own belief, there were no differences between neurotypical participants and those diagnosed with ASD. But, in the subsequent question phase, participants with ASD showed increased activity in the bilateral anterior prefrontal cortex, the left posterior frontal cortex, the left superior temporal gyrus, and the left temporoparietal area. These results suggest that during the story phase in which the participants processed observable actions the neural correlates do not differ between adult individuals with ASD and NT individuals. But in the question phase in which participants had to infer an unobservable mental state results revealed neural differences between the two groups. Possibly, these subtle neural processing differences may contribute to the fact that adult ASD individuals are able to master explicit false belief tasks but fail to apply their strategies during everyday social interaction