The Moral Judgment And Moral Behavior For Individuals With Higher Level Of Psychopathic Traits:an ERP Study

Psychopathy is characterized by distinctive traits including callousness,lack of guilt and self-accusation.These psychopathic features predispose individuals to engage in all manners of deviant behaviors,leading to frequent violations of moral and legal rules.Previously,researchers have explored the relationship between psychopathic traits and moral judgments using moral dilemmas.But so far,no agreement has reached over the question that whether individuals with a higher level of psychopathic traits can properly distinguish morally right from wrong.Although there has been some fMRI evidence demonstrating abnormal neural responses and atypical functional connectivity related to social-affective processing for psychopathic individuals,the online processing of moral judgment for individuals with higher psychopathic trait tendency remained an open question.Moreover,as far as we know,there was little event-related potential(ERP)research revealing the temporal-dynamic mechanism of atypical moral actions for higher psychopathic individuals.Therefore,the current study aimed at exploring the relationship between psychopathic trait tendency and moral judgments as well as actual moral behaviors using the ERP technique.In study 1,we intended to examine the relationship between psychopathic traits and moral judgments during the online processing of daily moral transgressions.Participants were divided into two groups: participants with higher psychopathic traits(HP)and participants with lower psychopathic traits(LP)based on their scores on the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale(LSRP).All of them were asked to evaluate the moral acceptability of different types of daily actions.The results showed that there was no association of psychopathy traits with the early ERP components during the online decoding of moral information,both HP and LP groups can distinguish moral violation from non-moral actions rapidly.Specifically,in the time window between 180~280 ms,the harm-and fair-related immoral events evoked greater positivity than the two non-moral events,suggesting that individuals with higher psychopathy have a good understanding of the binary distinctions between right and wrong.However,individuals with different levels of psychopathic traits performed differently on more sophisticated moral processing.Behaviorally,individuals with higher psychopathy were associated with more tolerance for the harm and fairness related to moral transgressions.the individuals in In the later time window of 280~320 ms,we found an interactive effect of psychopathic traits and online processing of moral evaluations.For participants scoring higher in psychopathy,harmful immoral behaviors were significantly different from neutral behaviors;for participants scoring lower in psychopathy,there was no separation between harmful and neutral behaviors.All of these findings suggest that harmful events may be more familiar for individuals in HP and were more consistent with their expectations of immoral events in daily life.In addition,significant dissociations between unfair and harmful immoral actions were found for lower-psychopathic-trait participants,indicating that individuals in LP may be more capable of classifying and identifying distinct types of moral violations in detail.In study 2,we intended to examine the relationship between psychopathic traits and moral behaviors using the ERP technique.In particular,we were interested in finding out the behavioral and neural correlates of moral behaviors of inflicting harm to unrelated others after receiving harm from another source among individuals with different levels of psychopathic traits.Again,we divided individuals into HP and LP.Results showed that HP was more likely to inflict high-intensity harm to an innocent person after suffering harm from others.For ERP findings,during the decision-phase,we found that the deflection of N2 for HP was more negative than that for LP.As N2 was accepted as an index for conflicts detection,higher-psychopathic-trait participants might have a stronger impulse to harm the unrelated third party,and thus has a greater conflict with its cognitive control.On the P3 component,the significant differences between two groups were also observed,with the reduced P3 component in individuals in HP indicating that they were more likely to be violent and aggressive tendencies.The findings during the result-phase were consistent with that of previous studies,the FRN was more sensitive to negative feedback,and the components induced by loss-trail were more negative.In addition,we found a significant negative correlation between the LSRP-2 scores and the FRN evoked by lost,indicating that individuals with high scores in the impulsive-antisocial features regarded ?You loss? as more negative feedback.We speculated that they would prefer to win the game to punish innocent others to let off steam.Based on the above findings,it can be concluded that psychopathic traits may have an impact on individuals' moral judgments and moral behaviors.The influence of psychopathic traits on online moral processing is more reflected in practical moral behaviors than in moral cognition.Although individuals with higher psychopathic tendency are able to make correct moral judgments,it becomes increasingly difficult for them to regulate their behaviors with moral principles that they have learned.To summer up,the present research added more behavioral and neural evidence for the dysfunctional moral capacity for individuals with higher psychopathic traits.