Cognitive Neural Mechanisms Of Moral Judgment In Chinese Athletes

Sports moral judgment is a form of thinking which refers to the athlete using moral norm or standard for the cognition of the moral phenomena in sports,which is a very complicated psychological process including moral intuition and moral cognition.At present,previous studies of sports moral judgment mainly focused on exploring the antecedents and consequences of sports moral judgment by means of paper and pencil test,that is,the influence factors of sport moral judgment and the relationship between sport moral judgment and moral behavior.Obviously,the underlying neural mechanisms remain to be elucidated.Accordingly,based on cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience as a perspective,the purpose of the study was to investigate the cognitive neural mechanisms underlying sport moral judgment in Chinese athletes used ERPs from behavior and cognitive level.First of all,on the basis of 537 pieces of news reports on moral misconducts of Chinese athletes from the internet and interviews with 90 athletes,this study sought to systematically investigate the types and representation of moral misconducts for Chinese athletes using Nvivo8.0,and indicated that the types and representation of moral misconducts.Secondly,based on the types and representation of moral misconducts,this study adapted four types of 160 materials of moral judgment commonly widespread collected by news and athletes interviews,and modified material according to the suggestion of relevant research.Meantime,the validity of four types of materials of moral judgment was performed on 187 athletes from percentages of affirmative responses,decision times,moral conflicts,moral acceptability,emotional valence and arousal valence.Finally,four types materials of moral judgment were administered to 19 high-level athletes used ERPs from behavior and cognitive level Results showed that(a)Types of moral misconduct behavior for Chinese athletes can be mainly divided into violence,doping,negative ball or game and self-knowing lose honesty.(b)Violence usually happens to skill oriented event group with the same field competition;doping usually happens to physical oriented event group with speed-strength,physical oriented event group with speed,physical oriented event group with endurance,skill oriented event group with fighting-confrontational,skill oriented event group with difficulty and beauty;negative ball or game usually happens to skill oriented event group with the same field competition,skill oriented event group with separated net confrontation,skill oriented event group with fighting-confrontational;self-knowing lose honesty happens to skill oriented event group with the same field competition,skill oriented event group with separated net confrontation(c)The validity of developed four type’s materials of moral judgment in sports were acceptable,violence,doping,negative ball or game and self-knowing lose honesty have 40 cases each,can be used as effective experimental materials to conduct the cognitive neural mechanisms of moral judgement research in the sports(d)The highest percentage of utilitarian was self-knowing lose honesty;doping’s utilitarian percentage was the lowest and response time was the lowest;the longest response time was negative ball or game(e)No significant difference were found between the four types of moral judgment in stimulus and response locked components,and anterior cingulate cortex(i.e.BA10 and BA25)were activated by four types of moral judgment,indicated that the four types of moral judgment maybe have the same cognitive mechanisms and as a results of the cognitive and emotional interaction.