Lecture 13: Emotions and Morality

What percent of Americans attend church once a month?

60%

What does not make sense about US?

According to our wealth and development level, 5% of us should see religion as important to life but 50% of us believe in God and devil We have a patriotic and conservative government due to founding Puritan values

Physical Body temperature and social warmth

Actual body temperature decreases after rejection experience and increases after inclusion experience recorded body temperature hourly and had patients rate how close they were feeling to family and friends correlation between body temperature and feeling close to others at the same time

Rejection and food preference

After rejection experience, greater preference for warm foods for lunch compared to cold foods

Founding ideologies on morality

Americans have a Puritan and Protestant work ethic from 400 years ago We were founded on Christian religion and patriotism in the 1600s We have the ideas that the harder you work, the better you are in the eyes of God People who work hard are good people

Scaffolding and metaphorical structures

Analogical reasoning Psychological concepts based on physical analogies We build abstract ideas upon physical concepts

Trolley Car Dilemma Greene and Cohen Study

Brain imaging while making moral decisions regarding the "trolley problem" discovered there are 2 different sources of moral judgments (moral and cognitive) People say pushing the fat man is morally wrong but that pulling the trigger is morally ok. Different brain regions are recruited when considering the two scenarios

Cultural differences in morality in terms of sports

Different sports and cultures have different standards about what is moral English commentators say that it is wrong to fake an injury in soccer Spanish commentators say "fake away!" because the ends justify the means. You are helping your team. Hockey: you just act like nothing happened when you are hit

Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail

Disgusting scenarios with all rational reasons for disgust removed Instead of moral reasoning producing the emotion, the emotion is experienced immediately and causes the reasoning The reasoning tends to support the immediate emotional reaction

Scaffolding and more abstract higher order concepts

Early formed original concepts based on physical experience and higher order goals and motives

Hard-wired connections and embodied cognition and emotions

hard-wired connections have developed, over time, between physical states and social concepts and motives

Physical priming of goals

Evolved goals for the survival and physical safety serve as the basis of goals that develop later in the person's life for psychological and social safety Satisfying the goals for survival turns off social safety needs

Mandler infant scaffolding

Infants can analyze and compare externally available information Formation of spatial concepts but no access to internal states Later internal psychological states are understood using physical concepts in analogical fashion

Metaphorical thought

Lakoff and Johnson: we think and communicate easily in terms of analogies Abstract terms are metaphorically related to basic physical terms Hot-headed, close-relationship, soft crime

Emotional reactions drive?

Moral judgments

Schnall clean room study

Moral judgments are more negative and severe when made in a dirty vs. clean room or after exposure to unclean vs. clean objects Relation between disgust and moral condemnation and cleanliness and moral purity or goodness

Social neuroscience replications and extensions of social priming studies

Replicated the jigsaw study but scenarios with rough primes caused judgments were less smooth and coordinated correlation between primary somatosensory cortex activation and the extremity of not-smooth judgments of interaction coordination

US compared to other countries

Other industrialized Protestant countries have become much less religious and traditional but US is still just as religious as it was 70 years ago In 2003, 40% of US attended church once a week like they did before WWII 7/10 Americans believe in devil

Room temperature study

People estimate room temperature to be colder after rejection experience and warmer after inclusion experience

Your highness study by Schubert

People react as fast as they can to words on the screen If you see a word denoting power that is presented on top of screen, you are faster works with lower words as well

Picture and power

People think those in higher positions in picture are more powerful

Paul Rozen power of disgust

People were unwilling to drink a favorite beverage into which a fully sterilized cockroach had been dipped They knew the drink was safe but couldnt get over disgust Cultures vary as to what they find disgusting Disgust is not based on taste but on knowledge of nature or origin of food in question

Bowlby and physical warmth

Physical warmth is naturally conflated with social warmth in early experience dictates attachment and ability to trust others

Activated brain regions and trolley problem

Pushing the fat man activates the more emotional centers like the amygdala

Earliest direct concepts about scaffolding

Spatial and other directly-experienced physical concepts are the earliest concepts formed by the infant As such they provide the foundational structure for later abstract concepts

Connection between temperature and social warmth

There is a common neural mechanism underlying the physical and social warmth evolved connections like Bowlby said

Physical and social pain connection

Tylenol The same brain region is activated for physical and social pain Like physical and moral connection between cleaniless

Social neuroscience and role of insula in social warmth

Warm/cold therapeutic pack and economics trust game People were betrayed in the economics game fMRI investigation of the insula found that the left anterior insula was more activated following cold vs. warm temperature and also more activated after betrayals of trust in economics game

Chapman disgust study about physically disgusting stimuli

We get the same reaction of facial disgust muscles when we see something physically digusting as we do when we hear about morally disgusting behavior Same EMG facial muscle response to physical and morally disgusting things

Changing Moral Standards

We have different moral standards for different social identities Depending on what is active, we change our moral standards The bankers had fewer morals in the coin reporting study when they had their banker identity activated

Emotional moral judgment

What you feel is right

Outgroup attitudes as disease prevention

When threatened with disease, vaccinated people exhibit less prejudice toward immigrants than unvaccinated people framing vaccination message in terms of immunity eliminates the relationship between chronic germ aversion and prejudice a disease protection manipulation (hand washing) is particulary effective for changing perceptions of outgroup members

Harry Harlow

Wire vs. cloth mothers the warm cloth mother enabled a successful transition of monkey into adulthood

Spatial map study

You can go to different stores but people would rather travel South because it is easier to follow gravity

Uhlmann and Bargh Religion and Country Study

Young potato peeler wins the lottery-- he either quits or keeps job How much do you like him? US likes him more if he keeps job and non-US likes him more if he quits job Puritans judge people by how hard they work

Physical and social sweetness

eating sweet foods related to prosocial behaviors (helpfulness) other people who like sweet food are more pleasant people who prefer sweet foods have more prosocial personalities tasting something sweet increased self reports of agreeableness daily diary studies show people do more helpful and prosocial things on days that they have eaten more sweet foods

Shared neural mechanisms underlying warmth and physical warmth

fMRI showed that reading of socially warm and neutral messages from friends and family and holding physically warm and neutral-temperature objects social warmth made people feel physically warmer and physical warmth made people feel socially warmer

Prejudice toward immigrants

function of disease threat and vaccination status if you are vaccinated, you have less prejudice

Hard vs. soft chair study

hard = less compromise in negotiations about price they were less likely to compromise if sitting in hard chair

General consumption goal has its roots in evolved need for food

hunger is underlying need state generalizes to broad, more abstract acquisition motive hunger makes you more likely to buy even more non-food products When you are hungry, you want to acquire more!

Hunger study

hunger makes you buy more at the supermarket unless you eat a test muffin first but hunger also makes you buy more at Target (self-reported hunger correlates with amount of money spent) hungry people also take more binder clips when given the opportunity, compared to non-hungry people

Heavy vs. light clipboard

in heavy condition, job candidate is rated as more serious about work and takes longer to complete evaluation (takes it more serious)

We share the same physical experiences so?

it is easy to talk to each other and understand each other we make analogies to physical experience and we understand them

Memory cause of embodied cognition and emotion

memory encodes bodily states associated with experiences arousal, low-energy can be associated with emotional experiences You remember how you felt in an instance and do it again

Physical priming of haptic sensations

metaphorical effects of physical touch on social judgment heavy=serious hard=difficult rough=effortful smooth=easy

Basic evolved goals

physical safety relates to disease avoidance hunger needs to be satisfied

Your Highness

power and verticality share metaphors looking up to someone high vs. low status

Scaffolding theory

psychological concepts are based on physical concepts

Spatial concepts

psychological distance emotional, relationships, temporal close relationship

Cognitive moral judgment

ration and focused on relative consequences

MacBeth Effect

recall a time when you did something immoral -> guilt People allowed to wash hands or not Would you help a grad student study? 74% if had not "washed away their sins" in sink vs. 41% if had

Underlying mechanisms of the physical priming

semantic priming (sweet, hard, smooth) innate structure (hard-wired) very early learning we could be having these effects because combination of verbal priming, evolved behavior, and early learning

Survival goals

shelter, food, water are basis for more abstract social goals more complex goals are actually driven by emotion and morality basics

4 Physical priming of social-psychological states

spatial (vertically, distance) temperature haptic sensations (rough/smooth) goals (survival, safety)

Jigsaw study

the jigsaw was either rough or smooth in texture The interactions went more smoothly if smooth texture

Temperature priming

there is a connection between physical and social warmth

Bargh and temperature study

took out warm/cold words in Asch study and replaced with an ice/warm beverage people saw the persona as warmer or colder depending on the drink people were influenced by the physical warmth

Asch

warm and cold are central traits we form impressions based on this trait

Fiske, Glick, Cuddy and warmth

warm-cold as one of 2 universal dimensions of outgroup stereotypes