Affective Flexibility: Evaluative Processing Goals Shape Amygdala Activity

Although early research implicated the amygdala in automatic processing of negative information, more recent research suggests that it plays a more general role in processing the motivational relevance of various stimuli, suggesting that the relation between valence and amygdala activation may depend on contextual goals. This study provides experimental evidence that the relation between valence and amygdala activity is dynamically modulated by evaluative goals. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants evaluated the positive, negative, or overall (positive plus negative) aspects of famous people. When participants were providing overall evaluations, both positive and negative names were associated with amygdala activation. When they were evaluating positivity, positive names were associated with amygdala activity, and when they were evaluating negativity, negative names were associated with amygdala activity. Evidence for a negativity bias was found; modulation was more pronounced for positive than for negative information. These data suggest that the amygdala flexibly processes motivationally relevant evaluative information in accordance with current processing goals, but processes negative information less flexibly than positive information

Mean responses following moral versus pragmatic evaluations in Experiment 1.

<p>Means are provided for raw reaction times (RT; in milliseconds) and extremity of responses for each block. Excludes all trials with reaction times >10,000 ms. Overall scores may not reflect mean Block scores due to rounding errors and missing trials. Pooled standard errors in parentheses.</p

The mean pragmatic and moral ratings (with standard errors) for each action in Experiment 1.

<p>The actions have been rank ordered on the Y-axis from the highest (left) to lowest (right) mean rating. The X-axis reflects the rating scale (range 1–7). Pragmatic ratings are relatively linear whereas moral ratings are curvilinear, reflecting differences in extremity.</p

Mean responses following moral versus pragmatic and moral versus hedonic evaluations in Experiment 3.

<p>Means are provided for raw reaction times (RT; in milliseconds) and extremity of responses for each block. Excludes all trials with reaction times >10,000 ms. Overall scores may not reflect mean Block scores due to rounding errors and missing trials. Pooled standard errors in parentheses.</p

Mean responses following moral versus pragmatic evaluations in Experiment 2.

<p>Means are provided for raw reaction times (RT; in milliseconds) and extremity of responses for each block. Excludes all trials with reaction times >10,000 ms. Overall scores may not reflect mean Block scores due to rounding errors and missing trials. Pooled standard errors in parentheses.</p

A visual representation of the moral and pragmatic evaluation trials presented in Experiment 1.

<p>On each trial, a fixation cross appeared for 1,000 ms before participants made a moral or pragmatic evaluation followed by a universality judgment. We recorded reaction times on the moral/pragmatic evaluation and university judgment. The trials were presented in four blocks. In each block, participants made moral and universality evaluations for 13 actions before switching to pragmatic and universality evaluations for 13 different actions.</p

The Importance of Moral Construal: Moral versus Non-Moral Construal Elicits Faster, More Extreme, Universal Evaluations of the Same Actions

<div><p>Over the past decade, intuitionist models of morality have challenged the view that moral reasoning is the sole or even primary means by which moral judgments are made. Rather, intuitionist models posit that certain situations automatically elicit moral intuitions, which guide moral judgments. We present three experiments showing that evaluations are also susceptible to the influence of moral versus non-moral construal. We had participants make moral evaluations (rating whether actions were morally good or bad) or non-moral evaluations (rating whether actions were pragmatically or hedonically good or bad) of a wide variety of actions. As predicted, moral evaluations were faster, more extreme, and more strongly associated with universal prescriptions—the belief that absolutely nobody or everybody should engage in an action—than non-moral (pragmatic or hedonic) evaluations of the same actions. Further, we show that people are capable of flexibly shifting from moral to non-moral evaluations on a trial-by-trial basis. Taken together, these experiments provide evidence that moral versus non-moral construal has an important influence on evaluation and suggests that effects of construal are highly flexible. We discuss the implications of these experiments for models of moral judgment and decision-making.</p> </div