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Looking up to virtue: averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations

Witnessing exemplary actions triggers admiration, a positive emotion that can pertain to concrete skills, or move the onlooker beyond physical characteristics to appreciate the abstract, moral implications. Participants reacted to narratives depicting skilled or virtuous protagonists first during a...

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Autores principales: Yang, Xiao-Fei, Pavarini, Gabriela, Schnall, Simone, Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234327/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30212913
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsy081
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author Yang, Xiao-Fei
Pavarini, Gabriela
Schnall, Simone
Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen
author_facet Yang, Xiao-Fei
Pavarini, Gabriela
Schnall, Simone
Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen
author_sort Yang, Xiao-Fei
collection PubMed
description Witnessing exemplary actions triggers admiration, a positive emotion that can pertain to concrete skills, or move the onlooker beyond physical characteristics to appreciate the abstract, moral implications. Participants reacted to narratives depicting skilled or virtuous protagonists first during a videotaped interview then during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We analyzed participants’ gaze aversion (an indicator of disengaging from the immediate environment) and cognitive construals (mentions of concrete characteristics vs abstract beliefs and values) during the interview, and relations to individuals’ subsequent neural activations. When participants averted their gaze, they were more likely to mention abstract construals, and both behaviors were more likely when reacting to virtue. Gaze aversion to virtue narratives predicted greater subsequent activation for those narratives in dorsal posterior cingulate cortex (dPCC), involved in visual attention control. The inferior-posterior posteromedial cortices (ipPMC), a default mode network hub involved in abstract thought, activated only to virtue, and activity level reflected individuals’ tendency to abstract construals. Critically, dPCC and ipPMC activity sequentially mediated the relationship between individuals’ gaze and abstract construal tendencies. No such relationships existed for reactions to skill, despite participants reporting equivalently strong positive emotion. In appreciating virtue, dPCC may support individuals in transcending the viewable context, facilitating ipPMC activity and moral construals.
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spelling pubmed-62343272018-11-19 Looking up to virtue: averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations Yang, Xiao-Fei Pavarini, Gabriela Schnall, Simone Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci Original Article Witnessing exemplary actions triggers admiration, a positive emotion that can pertain to concrete skills, or move the onlooker beyond physical characteristics to appreciate the abstract, moral implications. Participants reacted to narratives depicting skilled or virtuous protagonists first during a videotaped interview then during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We analyzed participants’ gaze aversion (an indicator of disengaging from the immediate environment) and cognitive construals (mentions of concrete characteristics vs abstract beliefs and values) during the interview, and relations to individuals’ subsequent neural activations. When participants averted their gaze, they were more likely to mention abstract construals, and both behaviors were more likely when reacting to virtue. Gaze aversion to virtue narratives predicted greater subsequent activation for those narratives in dorsal posterior cingulate cortex (dPCC), involved in visual attention control. The inferior-posterior posteromedial cortices (ipPMC), a default mode network hub involved in abstract thought, activated only to virtue, and activity level reflected individuals’ tendency to abstract construals. Critically, dPCC and ipPMC activity sequentially mediated the relationship between individuals’ gaze and abstract construal tendencies. No such relationships existed for reactions to skill, despite participants reporting equivalently strong positive emotion. In appreciating virtue, dPCC may support individuals in transcending the viewable context, facilitating ipPMC activity and moral construals. Oxford University Press 2018-09-13 /pmc/articles/PMC6234327/ /pubmed/30212913 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsy081 Text en © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Original Article
Yang, Xiao-Fei
Pavarini, Gabriela
Schnall, Simone
Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen
Looking up to virtue: averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations
title Looking up to virtue: averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations
title_full Looking up to virtue: averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations
title_fullStr Looking up to virtue: averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations
title_full_unstemmed Looking up to virtue: averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations
title_short Looking up to virtue: averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations
title_sort looking up to virtue: averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234327/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30212913
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsy081
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