Facial expressions of emotion are thought to have evolved from the development of facial muscles used in sensory regulation and later adapted to express moral judgment. Negative moral judgment includes the expressions of anger, disgust and contempt. Here, we study the hypothesis that these facial expressions of negative moral judgment have further evolved into a facial expression of negation re...

Based on emerging research, we propose that human perception is preferentially attuned to moral content. We describe how moral concerns enhance detection of morally relevant stimuli, and both command and direct attention. These perceptual processes, in turn, have important consequences for moral judgment and behavior.

Traditional approaches to moral psychology assumed that moral judgments resulted from the application of explicit commitments, such as those embodied in consequentialist or deontological philosophies. In contrast, recent work suggests that moral judgments often result from unconscious or emotional processes, with explicit commitments generated post hoc. This paper explores the intermediate posi...

Decision-making involves a complex interplay of emotional responses and reasoning processes. In this study, we use TMS to explore the neurobiological substrates of moral decisions in humans. To examining the effects of TMS on the outcome of a moral-decision, we compare the decision outcome of moral-personal and moral-impersonal dilemmas to each other and examine the differential effects of appl...

Moral values are culturally variable entities that emerge from dynamic, hierarchical interactions between individualand group-level phenomena. Human-generated unstructured data, from sources such as social media, offer an unprecedented opportunity to observe these phenomena in a natural habitat, which is an essential vantage point for understanding moral values and their role in moral judgment ...

Contemporary moral psychology has focused on the notion of a universal moral sense, robust to individual and cultural differences. Yet recent evidence has revealed individual differences in the psychological processes for moral judgment: controlled cognition, mental-state reasoning, and emotional responding. We discuss this evidence and its relation to cross-cultural diversity

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.

Morality is at the core of social development. How individuals treat one another, develop a sense of obligation toward others regarding equality and equity, and understand the emotions experienced by victims and victimizers, are essential ingredients for healthy development, and for creating a just and civil society. In this chapter, we review research on two forms of social exclusion, intergro...

Research on distributive justice indicates that preschool-age children take issues of equity and merit into account when distributing desirable items, but that they often prefer to see desirable items allocated equally in third-party tasks. By contrast, less is known about the development of retributive justice. In a study with 4- to 10-year-old children (n = 123) and adults (n = 93), we direct...