Right or wrong? The brain's fast response to morally objectionable statements

Psychological Science

Volumn 20, Issue 9, 2009, Pages 1092-1099

  Van Berkum, Jos J A ^a,b,c   Holleman, Bregje ^d   Nieuwland, Mante ^a,e   Otten, Marte ^a,f   Murre, Jaap ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM   (Netherlands)

^b MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR PSYCHOLINGUISTICS   (Netherlands)

^c RADBOUD UNIVERSITY NIJMEGEN   (Netherlands)

^d UTRECHT UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

^e TUFTS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^f HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADULT; AROUSAL; ARTICLE; ATTITUDE; BRAIN CORTEX; BRAIN MAPPING; CONFLICT; DECISION MAKING; ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY; EVOKED RESPONSE; FEMALE; HUMAN; MALE; MIDDLE AGED; MORALITY; PHYSIOLOGY; POLITICS; READING; RELIGION; SEMANTICS; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY;

ADULT; AROUSAL; ATTITUDE; BRAIN MAPPING; CEREBRAL CORTEX; CHRISTIANITY; CONFLICT (PSYCHOLOGY); ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY; EVOKED POTENTIALS; FEMALE; HUMANS; JUDGMENT; MALE; MIDDLE AGED; MORALS; POLITICS; READING; RELIGION AND PSYCHOLOGY; SEMANTICS; SOCIAL VALUES;

EID: 69549122770     PISSN: 09567976     EISSN: 14679280     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02411.x     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. Baumeister, R.F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C. Vohs, K.D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5, 323 370.
2. Bernat, E., Bunce, S. Shevrin, H. (2001). Event-related brain potentials differentiate positive and negative mood adjectives during both supraliminal and subliminal visual processing. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 42, 11 34.
3. Cacioppo, J.T., Crites, S.L., Berntson, G.G. Coles, M.G.H. (1993). If attitudes affect how stimuli are processed, should they not affect the event-related brain potential? Psychological Science, 4, 108 112.
4. Cacioppo, J.T., Crites, S.L., Gardner, W.L. Berntson, G.G. (1994). Bioelectrical echoes from evaluative categorizations: I. A late positive brain potential that varies as a function of trait negativity and extremity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 115 125.
5. Cacioppo, J.T., Larsen, J.T., Smith, N.K. Berntson, G.G. (2004). The affect system: What lurks below the surface of feelings? In A.S.R. Manstead, N.H. Frijda A.H. Fischer (Eds.), Feelings and emotions: The Amsterdam conference (pp. 223 242). New York : Cambridge University Press.
6. Clark, H.H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge, England : Cambridge University Press.
7. Crites, S.L., Cacioppo, J.T., Gardner, W.L. Berntson, G.G. (1995). Bioelectrical echoes from evaluative categorization: II. A late positive brain potential that varies as a function of attitude registration rather than attitude report. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 997 1013.
8. Cunningham, W. Zelazo, P.D. (2007). Attitudes and evaluation: A social cognitive neuroscience perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 97 104.
9. Damasio, A.R. (2004). Emotions and feelings: A neurobiological perspective. In A.S.R. Manstead, N.H. Frijda A.H. Fischer (Eds.), Feelings and emotions: The Amsterdam conference (pp. 49 57). New York : Cambridge University Press.
10. Federmeier, K.D. (2007). Thinking ahead: The role and roots of prediction in language comprehension. Psychophysiology, 44, 491 505.
11. Fischler, I., Bloom, P.A., Childers, D.G., Arroyo, A.A. Perry, N.W. (1984). Brain potentials during sentence verification: Late negativity and long-term memory strength. Neuropsychologia, 22, 559 568.
12. Greene, J.D. (2003). From neural 'is' to moral 'ought': What are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 847 850.
13. Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814 834.
14. Holleman, B.C. Murre, J.M.J. (2008). Getting from neuron to checkmark: Models and methods in cognitive survey research. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 22, 709 732.
15. Holt, D.J., Lynn, S.K. Kuperberg, G.R. (in press). Neurophysiological correlates of comprehending emotional meaning in context. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
16. Ito, T.A. Cacioppo, J.T. (2000). Electrophysiological evidence of implicit and explicit categorization processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 660 676.
17. Ito, T.A., Larsen, J.T., Smith, N.K. Cacioppo, J.T. (1998). Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 887 900.
18. Jung, T.P., Makeig, S., Westerfield, M., Townsend, J., Courchesne, E. Sejnowski, T.J. (2000). Removal of eye activity artifacts from visual event-related potentials in normal and clinical subjects. Clinical Neurophysiology, 111, 1745 1758.
19. Kisley, M.A., Wood, S. Burrows, C.L. (2007). Looking at the sunny side of life: Age-related change in an event-related potential measure of the negativity bias. Psychological Science, 18, 838 843.
20. Kutas, M. Hillyard, S.A. (1980). Reading senseless sentences: Brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity. Science, 207, 203 205.
21. Kutas, M. Hillyard, S.A. (1984). Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association. Nature, 307, 161 163.
22. Kutas, M., Van Petten, C. Kluender, R. (2006). Psycholinguistics electrified II (1994-2005). In M. Traxler M.A. Gernsbacher (Eds.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (2nd ed., pp. 659 724). New York : Elsevier.
23. Lau, E.F., Phillips, C. Poeppel, D. (2008). A cortical network for semantics: (De)constructing the N400. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 920 933.
24. Morris, J.P., Squires, N.K., Taber, C.S. Lodge, M. (2003). Activation of political attitudes: A psychophysiological examination of the hot cognition hypothesis. Political Psychology, 24, 727 745.
25. Otten, M. Van Berkum, J.J.A. (2007). What makes a discourse constraining? Comparing the effects of discourse message and scenario fit on the discourse-dependent N400 effect. Brain Research, 1153, 166 177.
26. Otten, M. Van Berkum, J.J.A. (2008). Discourse-based anticipation during language processing: Prediction or priming? Discourse Processes, 45, 464 496.
27. Pizzagalli, D.A., Lehmann, D., Hendrick, A.M., Regard, M., Pascual-Marqui, R.D. Davidson, R.J. (2002). Affective judgments of faces modulate early activity (∼160 ms) within the fusiform gyri. NeuroImage, 16, 663 677.
28. Rozin, P. Royzman, E. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 296 320.
29. Sabatinelli, D., Lang, P.J., Keil, A. Bradley, M.M. (2007). Emotional perception: Correlation of functional MRI and event-related potentials. Cerebral Cortex, 17, 1085 1091.
30. Satpute, A.B. Lieberman, M.D. (2006). Integrating automatic and controlled processing into neurocognitive models of social cognition. Brain Research, 1079, 86 97.
31. Schupp, H.T., Cuthbert, B.N., Bradley, M.M., Cacioppo, J.T., Ito, T. Lang, P.J. (2000). Affective picture processing: The late positive potential is modulated by motivational relevance. Psychophysiology, 37, 257 261.
32. Schupp, H.T., Cuthbert, B.N., Hillman, C., Raymann, R., Bradley, M.M. Lang, P.J. (1996). ERPs and blinks: Sex differences in response to erotic and violent picture content. Psychophysiology, 33, 75.
33. Schupp, H.T., Öhman, A., Junghöfer, M., Weike, A.I., Stockburger, J. Hamm, A.O. (2004). The facilitated processing of threatening faces: An ERP analysis. Emotion, 4, 189 200.
34. Smith, N.K., Cacioppo, J.T., Larsen, J.T. Chartrand, T.L. (2003). May I have your attention, please: Electrocortical responses to positive and negative stimuli. Neuropsychologia, 41, 171 183.
35. Tourangeau, R., Rips, L.J. Rasinski, K. (2000). The psychology of survey response. Cambridge, England : Cambridge University Press.
36. Van Berkum, J.J.A. (2008). Understanding sentences in context: What brain waves can tell us. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 376 380.
37. Van Berkum, J.J.A. (in press-a). The electrophysiology of discourse and conversation. In M. Spivey, K. McRae M. Joanisse (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics. Cambridge, England : Cambridge University Press.
38. Van Berkum, J.J.A. (in press-b). The neuropragmatics of 'simple' utterance comprehension: An ERP review. In U. Sauerland K. Yatsushiro (Eds.), Semantics and pragmatics: From experiment to theory. New York : Palgrave.
39. Van den Brink, D., Van Berkum, J.J.A., Bastiaansen, M.C.M., Tesink, C.M.J.Y., Kos, M., Buitelaar, J.K. Hagoort, P. (2009). Empathy matters: ERP and brain oscillatory evidence for inter-individual differences in social language processing. Manuscript submitted for publication.
40. Van den Noort, M.W.M.L., Bosch, M.P.C., Haverkort, M. Hugdahl, K. (2008). A standard computerized version of the Reading Span Test in different languages. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 24, 35 42.