Affiliations: National Institute of Mental Health, USA
Note: [] Address for correspondence: James Blair, Mood & Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, 15k North Drive, Bethesda, Maryland, 20892. E-mail: blairj@intra.nimh.nih.gov
Abstract: This paper selectively reviews the literature on the moral emotions (empathy, guilt, shame and embarrassment) and moral reasoning from the perspective of affective cognitive neuroscience. Simulation based accounts of emotional empathy based on the human mirror neuron system appear inadequate. Instead, emotional empathy may be better considered as another emotional response to a stimulus; we become fearful to objects associated with threat whether they are weapons or the frightened faces of other individuals. There appear to be two interrelated neurocognitive components to the moral emotions of guilt, embarrassment and shame. The first involves dorsomedial and inferior frontal cortex activations and may relate to restitution and appeasement related behavior associated with these emotions. The second involves ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region critical for representing emotional information. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, are consistently implicated in human neuroimaging studies investigating moral reasoning, stressing the importance of emotion in moral reasoning.
Keywords: Moral emotion, moral reasoning, moral neuroscience
