Different influences of moral violation with and without physical impurity on face processing: An event-related potentials study

PLoS One. 2020 Dec 16;15(12):e0243929. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243929. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

It has been widely accepted that moral violations that involve impurity (such as spitting in public) induce the emotion of disgust, but there has been a debate about whether moral violations that do not involve impurity (such as swearing in public) also induce the same emotion. The answer to this question may have implication for understanding where morality comes from and how people make moral judgments. This study aimed to compared the neural mechanisms underlying two kinds of moral violation by using an affective priming task to test the effect of sentences depicting moral violation behaviors with and without physical impurity on subsequent detection of disgusted faces in a visual search task. After reading each sentence, participants completed the face search task. Behavioral and electrophysiological (event-related potential, or ERP) indices of affective priming (P2, N400, LPP) and attention allocation (N2pc) were analyzed. Results of behavioral data and ERP data showed that moral violations both with and without impurity promoted the detection of disgusted faces (RT, N2pc); moral violations without impurity impeded the detection of neutral faces (N400). No priming effect was found on P2 and LPP. The results suggest both types of moral violation influenced the processing of disgusted faces and neutral faces, but the neural activity with temporal characteristics was different.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Attention / physiology
  • Behavior / physiology*
  • Disgust
  • Electroencephalography
  • Emotions / physiology*
  • Evoked Potentials / physiology
  • Face / physiology*
  • Facial Expression
  • Facial Recognition / physiology
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Language
  • Male
  • Morals*
  • Reaction Time / physiology
  • Retrospective Moral Judgment
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (No.18YJC90018), self-determined research funds of CCNU from the colleges’ basic research and operation of MOE (CCNU19TD018), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (CCNU20QN024). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.