Frontiers in Psychology
Frontiers in Psychology
4 years ago

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Affects Judgments of Moral Violations.

Xu Lei, Jing Yu, Yong Liu, Serik Tabarak, Wenxin Su, Hong Yuan
Previous studies show that neural activities in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are correlated with moral processing during picture viewing tasks. In this study, we applied transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to determine whether this non-invasive brain stimulation technique could modulate the evaluation of moral violations. Sixty-four subjects were randomly recruited, separated into different groups and tested with 42 pairs of pictures depicting moral violations. Each subject was required to rate the pictures two separate times, i.e., before and after tDCS intervention. We found that anodal tDCS (atDCS) increases cortical excitability over the mPFC (between the Fpz and Fp1 positions) as well as the sense of morality and emotional arousal of the subjects. In conclusion, this study indicated that the mPFC plays an important role in moral judgments while modulating ratings of moral violations under tDCS intervention conditions.

Publisher URL: http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01812

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01812

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.