Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Reactions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reactions. Show all posts

Friday, July 21, 2017

Judgment Before Emotion: People Access Moral Evaluations Faster than Affective States

Corey Cusimano, Stuti Thapa Magar, & Bertram F. Malle

Abstract

Theories about the role of emotions in moral cognition make different predictions about the relative speed of moral and affective judgments: those that argue that felt emotions are causal inputs to moral judgments predict that recognition of affective states should precede moral judgments; theories that posit emotional states as the output of moral judgment predict the opposite. Across four studies, using a speeded reaction time task, we found that self-reports of felt emotion were delayed relative to reports of event-directed moral judgments (e.g. badness) and were no faster than person directed moral judgments (e.g. blame). These results pose a challenge to prominent theories arguing that moral judgments are made on the basis of reflecting on affective states.

The article is here.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

The Funny Thing About Adversity

By David DeSteno
The New York Times
Originally published October 16, 2015

Here are several excerpts:

In both studies, the results were the same. Those who had faced increasingly severe adversities in life — loss of a loved one at an early age, threats of violence or the consequences of a natural disaster — were more likely to empathize with others in distress, and, as a result, feel more compassion for them. And of utmost importance, the more compassion they felt, the more money they donated (in the first study) or the more time they devoted to helping the other complete his work (in the second).

Now, if experiencing any type of hardship can make a person more compassionate, you might assume that the pinnacle of compassion would be reached when someone has experienced the exact trial or misfortune that another person is facing. Interestingly, this turns out to be dead wrong.

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As a result of this glitch, reflecting on your own past experience with a specific misfortune will very likely cause you to under appreciate just how trying that exact challenge can be for someone else (or was, in fact, for you at the time). You overcame it, you think; so should he. The result? You lack compassion.

The entire article is here.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Me, My “Self” and You: Neuropsychological Relations between Social Emotion, Self-Awareness, and Morality

By Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Emotion Review July 2011 vol. 3 no. 3 313-315

Abstract

Social emotions about others’ mind states, for example, compassion for psychological pain or admiration for virtue, are an important foundation for morality because they help us decide how to treat other people. Although these emotions are ostensibly concerned with the mental qualities and situations of others, they can precipitate intimately subjective reflections on the quality of one’s own social life and mind, and via these reflections incite a desire to engage in meaningful moral actions. Our interview and neural data suggest that the shift from social emotion to introspection may be facilitated by conscious mental evaluation of emotion-related visceral sensations.

The entire paper is here.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Why I am not Charlie

By Scott Long
A Paper Bird Blog
Originally posted January 9, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

It’s true, as Salman Rushdie says, that “Nobody has the right to not be offended.” You should not get to invoke the law to censor or shut down speech just because it insults you or strikes at your pet convictions. You certainly don’t get to kill because you heard something you don’t like. Yet, manhandled by these moments of mass outrage, this truism also morphs into a different kind of claim: That nobody has the right to be offended at all.

I am offended when those already oppressed in a society are deliberately insulted. I don’t want to participate. This crime in Paris does not suspend my political or ethical judgment, or persuade me that scatologically smearing a marginal minority’s identity and beliefs is a reasonable thing to do. Yet this means rejecting the only authorized reaction to the atrocity. Oddly, this peer pressure seems to gear up exclusively where Islam’s involved. When a racist bombed a chapter of a US civil rights organization this week, the media didn’t insist I give to the NAACP in solidarity. When a rabid Islamophobic rightist killed 77 Norwegians in 2011, most of them at a political party’s youth camp, I didn’t notice many #IAmNorway hashtags, or impassioned calls to join the Norwegian Labor Party. But Islam is there for us, it unites us against Islam. Only cowards or traitors turn down membership in the Charlie club.The demand to join, endorse, agree is all about crowding us into a herd where no one is permitted to cavil or condemn: an indifferent mob, where differing from one another is Thoughtcrime, while indifference to the pain of others beyond the pale is compulsory.

The entire blog post is here.

Editor's note: This is a long and interesting piece on emotional reactions to tragic and traumatic events.