Study shows moral responses change as people age

A new study has found that moral responses change as people age.

Study author Jean Decety said both preschool children and adults distinguish between damage done either intentionally or accidentally when assessing whether a perpetrator has done something wrong.

But, adults are much less likely than children to think someone should be punished for damaging an object, for example, especially if the action was accidental.

The study combined brain scanning, eye-tracking and behavioural measures to understand brain responses.

"This is the first study to examine brain and behaviour relationships in response to moral and non-moral situations from a neurodevelopmental perspective," Decety wrote in the article.

Decety, who is the Irving B Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago and a leading scholar on affective and social neuroscience, said the different responses correlate with the various stages of development.

As the brain becomes better equipped to make reasoned judgments and integrate an understanding of the mental states of others, moral judgments become more tempered.

Negative emotions alert people to the moral nature of a situation by bringing on discomfort that can precede moral judgment. Such an emotional response is stronger in young children, he explained.

Decety and colleagues studied 127 participants, aged 4 to 36, who were shown short video clips while undergoing an fMRI scan.

The team also measured changes in the dilation of the people's pupils as they watched the clips.

The study revealed that the extent of activation in different areas of the brain as participants were exposed to the morally laden videos changed with age.

In young children, the amygdala, which is associated with the generation of emotional responses to a social situation, was much more activated than it was in adults.

In contrast, adults' responses were highest in the dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex areas of the brain that allow people to reflect on the values linked to outcomes and actions.

"Whereas young children had a tendency to consider all perpetrators malicious, irrespective of intention and targets (people and objects), as participants aged, they perceived the perpetrator as clearly less mean when carrying out an accidental action, and even more so when the target was an object," Decety said.

The study was published in the journal Cerebral Cortex in an article titled The Contribution of Emotion and Cognition to Moral Sensitivity: A Neurodevelopmental Study.