Guilt, shame, and embarrassment are quintessential moral emotions with important regulatory functions for the individual and society. Moral emotions are, however, difficult to study with neuroimaging methods because their elicitation is more intricate than that of basic emotions. Here, using functional MRI (fMRI), we employed a novel social prejudice paradigm to examine specific brain regions a...

Moral emotions are experienced in daily life and crucial for mediating appropriate social behaviors, as they prevent individuals from committing transgressions. In this study, caregivers of 377 children aged between 2.5 6.5 years old completed the Emotions Questionnaire (MEQ), a parent report aimed to separately identify presence shame, guilt, pride behaviors early childhood. To validate newly ...

Within the past decade, the field of moral psychology has begun to disentangle the mechanics behind moral judgments, revealing the vital role that emotions play in driving these processes. However, given the well-documented dissociation between attitudes and behaviors, we propose that an equally important issue is how emotions inform actual moral behavior – a question that has been relatively i...

Morality dignifies and elevates. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, God said "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil" (Gen. 3:22). In many of the world's religious traditions, the good go up, to heaven or a higher rebirth, and the bad go down, to hell or a lower rebirth. Even among secular people, moral motives are spoken of as the "highest" and "noblest" motives,...

The present research examines evidence for the sentimentalist claim that emotions are the foundation of moral judgment. It considers the psychopath, known for his deficient emotional capacities, as a case study to test intuitions about the emotion’s role in moral judgment. Graham and colleagues (2009) examined moral judgment differences between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. Psychopaths showe...

In recent trends, the mechanism of coping, a psychological mechanism that consists of expending conscious effort to respond to the significance of events, is incorporated in Affective Intelligent Agents to deal with negative situations, usually signaled by strong negative emotions. In this paper, we propose to adopt Roseman’s coping theory to model emotional coping in an intelligent agent that ...

A central question in the development and design of artificial moral agents is whether the absence of emotions, and the capacity of computer systems to manage large quantities of information and analyze many courses of actions, will make them equal or superior to humans in making moral judgments. The contrasting contention that emotions, a sense of self, embodiment, consciousness, and the abili...

Far from being unthinking energies or irrational impulses that control or push people around, emotions are intricately connected to the way people perceive, understand, and think about the world. As such, emotions are also an inextricable part of people's moral lives. As people go about making moral judgments and decisions, they do not merely apply abstract principles in a detached manner. Thei...