Abstract
The judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty objectively refer to the perception and evaluation of moral traits, which are generally influenced by facial attractiveness. For centuries, people have equated beauty with the possession of positive qualities, but it is not clear whether the association between beauty and positive qualities exerts a similarly implicit influence on people's responses to moral goodness and moral beauty, how it affects those responses, and what is the neural basis for such an effect. The present study is the first to examine the neural responses to facial attractiveness in the judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty. We found that beautiful faces in both moral judgments activated the left ventral occipitotemporal cortices sensitive to the geometric configuration of the faces, demonstrating that both moral goodness and moral beauty required the automatic visual analysis of geometrical configuration of attractive faces. In addition, compared to beautiful faces during moral goodness judgment, beautiful faces during moral beauty judgment induced unique activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and midline cortical structures involved in the emotional-valenced information about attractive faces. The opposite comparison elicited specific activity in the left superior temporal cortex and premotor area, which play a critical role in the recognition of facial identity. Our results demonstrated that the neural responses to facial attractiveness in the process of higher order moral decision-makings exhibit both task-general and task-specific characteristics. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the essence of the relationship between morality and aesthetics.
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All data analyzed in this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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This study was supported by funding from Project of Key Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences (Grant Number: 16JJD880025) and from National Social Science Foundation (Grant Number: 19ZDA360).
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QC, XW and LM constructed the research idea. All authors of this paper contributed to the experimental design of the work. QC and ZH collected and analyzed the data. QC wrote the main manuscript text. QC, ZH, SL, YK, XW and LM provided critical revisions. QC and ZH contributed equally to this study. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.
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Cheng, Q., Han, Z., Liu, S. et al. Neural responses to facial attractiveness in the judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty. Brain Struct Funct 227, 843–863 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-021-02422-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-021-02422-5