Moral Judgment Under Induced Anxiety: Threat-of-Shock Reduces Sensitivity to Immoral Acts and Alters Neural Processing.

Abstract

This study investigates how anxiety influences moral judgment processes using event-related potential (ERP) techniques. Participants were instructed to rate their feelings towards other's moral and immoral acts while neural responses were recorded under safe and threat-of-shock (TOS) conditions. Participants reported significantly higher anxiety levels in the TOS context, accompanied by increased non-specific skin conductance responses (NSSCR), indicating heightened autonomic nervous system activity. Behaviorally, participants in the TOS context rated immoral behaviors as significantly less unpleasant compared to those in the safe context, while ratings for moral behaviors did not differ significantly, suggesting reduced sensitivity to immoral acts in TOS context. ERP results revealed larger N1 amplitudes in response to immoral behaviors in the TOS condition, reflecting heightened attention to threatening stimuli. In contrast, the N400 component showed significant differences between moral and immoral acts only in the safe condition; this distinction was absent in the TOS condition, indicating impaired semantic processing under anxiety. Together, these findings demonstrate that threat-induced anxiety disrupts moral judgment processes, leading to reduced sensitivity to immoral behaviors. This highlights the critical role of anxiety in moral processing and the flexibility and context-dependence of moral judgments.