1. Anthony Correa Stephanie Regan Kasha Geels
Group 2
Anthony Correa
Stephanie Regan
Kasha Geels

2. Moral Judgments
Broadly defined as evaluative judgments of the appropriateness of one’s behavior within the context of socialized perceptions of right and wrong (Moll et al. 2005)

3. Development of Thinking about Moral Judgment
Moral judgments have been thought to rely solely on controlled, rational, and logical thought processes (Kohlberg, 1969; Turiel, 1983).
More recent research includes an emotional component in moral judgments as well. Some argue for the belief that moral judgments are direct products of implicit processes (e.g. guilt, compassion; compete and interact to guide morality without having conscious awareness that this is taking place).
“Moral intuitions”

4. Moral Emotions Derive from self consciousness and evaluation
Implicit processes
Examples are guilt; compassion

5. Controlled Cognitive Processes
They play a role in moral judgment only when situational demand necessitates them (e.g. moral dilemma)
Explicit processing

6. Dual Process and Interactionist Models of Moral Judgment
Dual Process – implicit and explicit processes both form moral judgments and often compete against one another
Interactionist – believes that moral judgments are formed by the integration of social contextual knowledge, social semantic knowledge, and basic motivational and emotional drives.

7. Table 1 Summarized 5 types of moral judgments accessed:
Impersonal moral dilemmas
Personal moral dilemmas
Violation of social norms
Social affective situations
Intent involved in situations that engender self-benefit
The moral judgment is the resolution to the dilemmas.

8. Brain Function
We know where the processing center of neural thought takes place, it is in the Basal Ganglia where the caudate is transmitting continuously between its Two spheres.
The Fornix which retains working memory and long term episodic memory trigger like in PTSD, borders the Basal Ganglia and the Cingulate Gyrus.
The Caudate is proximal to the fornix share transmission.
The Anterior Cingulate Cortex is a Hub for signal distribution, highly active in attention, perception, social cognition and moral judgment.
The emotional component resides in the Amygdala which is directly linked to the Basal Ganglia therefore the pathway would progress anterior toward PFC.

9. Regions of Prefrontal Cortex

10. Brain Regions

11. Ventral Medial Prefrontal Cortex VMPFC

12. Function of PFC
The area associated with cognitive and executive function
PFC segmented into DLPFC, VLPFC, VMPFC, DMPFC, OFC regions.
Medial and Orbital Frontal regions hubs for integrating emotional and viscerally arousing information
Fusiform face area – neural mechanism dedicated to perception of faces

13. DLPFC involved in “working memory?”
Is according to the article involved in receiving emotional and visceral arousing information from the medial and orbital frontal region of the brain.
Given the top down afferent transmission in relation to the Basal Ganglia this remains speculative.
Through proximity DLPFC gathers information from the somatosensory and motor cortices.
Reasoning the Striatum of the Basal Ganglia is where the stop/go mechanism resides

14. Basal Ganglia transmission pathway

15. Pyramid Neuron

16. Pyramid Cells