The present study compared 20 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease with 20 older controls (ages 69-94 years) on their ability to make inferences about emotions and beliefs in others. Six tasks tested their ability to make 1st-order and 2nd-order inferences as well as to offer explanations and moral evaluations of human action by appeal to emotions and beliefs. Results showed that ...

Information technology may be able to help people become better ethical decision makers. This paper explores philosophical and psychological issues underlying the design of a moral dilemma support system (MDSS). The effects of schemas, decision strategies, social information, and emotions on dilemma analysis are considered. MDSS features that would help people understand moral dilemmas, choose ...

B eginning with the problem of integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives on moral cognition, we argue that the various disciplines have an interest in developing a common conceptual framework for moral cognition research. We discuss issues arising in the other chapters in this volume that might serve as focal points for future investigation and as the basis for the eventual development of s...

Moral emotions such as pride, guilt and shame play an important role in the social-emotional development of preschool children. However, there are not many instruments available for measuring moral age. Moreover, relatively few research had examined cross-cultural validity measures emotions. The present study tested Chinese version emotion questionnaire (MEQ) upon a group (N = 182) children age...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Human morality has been investigated using a variety of tasks ranging from judgments of hypothetical dilemmas to viewing morally salient stimuli. These experiments have provided insight into neural correlates of moral judgments and emotions, yet these approaches reveal important differences in moral cognition. Moral reasoning tasks require active deliberation while mor...

The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ve...

The investigation of the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying the moral mind is of paramount importance for understanding complex human behaviors, from altruism to antisocial acts. A new study on patients with prefrontal damage provides key insights on the neurobiology of moral judgment and raises new questions on the mechanisms by which reason and emotion contribute to moral cognition.