Moral judgement under induced anxiety: threat-of-shock reduces sensitivity to immoral acts and alters neural...

This study investigates how anxiety influences moral judgement processes using event-related potential (ERP) techniques. Participants were instructed to rate their feelings towards others' moral and immoral acts while neural responses were recorded under safe and threat-of-shock (TOS) conditions. Participants reported significantly higher anxiety levels in the TOS context, accompanied by increased non-specific skin conductance responses (NSSCR), indicating heightened autonomic nervous system activity. Behaviourally, participants in the TOS context rated immoral behaviours as significantly less unpleasant compared to those in the safe context, while ratings for moral behaviours did not differ significantly, suggesting reduced sensitivity to immoral acts in the TOS context. ERP results revealed larger N1 amplitudes in response to immoral behaviours in the TOS condition, reflecting heightened attention to threatening stimuli. In contrast, the N400 component showed significant differences between moral and immoral acts only in the safe condition; this distinction was absent in the TOS condition, indicating impaired semantic processing under anxiety. Together, these findings demonstrate that threat-induced anxiety disrupts moral judgement processes, leading to reduced sensitivity to immoral behaviours. This highlights the critical role of anxiety in moral processing and the flexibility and context dependence of moral judgements.