The Upside of Outrage.

A debate has emerged across disciplines about why people engage in costly helping. Empathy is one mechanism. We highlight a second, more controversial motivator: moral outrage.

Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is associated with impairments in both spontaneous and deliberative moral judgments.

Implicit moral evaluations-spontaneous, unintentional judgments about the moral status of actions or persons-are thought to play a pivotal role in moral experience, suggesting a need for research to model these moral evaluations in clinical populations. Prior research reveals that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is a critical area underpinning affect and morality, and patients with vmPFC lesions show abnormalities in moral judgment and moral behavior. We use indirect measurement and multinomial modeling to understand differences in implicit moral evaluations among patients with vmPFC lesions.

Constructing contempt.

Gervais & Fessler argue that contempt is a natural kind and that its experience cannot be explained by a constructionist account of emotion. We dispute these claims and offer a positive constructionist model of contempt that accounts for the existing evidence and unifies conflicting findings in the literature on contempt.

The empathy impulse: A multinomial model of intentional and unintentional empathy for pain.

Empathy for pain is often described as automatic. Here, we used implicit measurement and multinomial modeling to formally quantify unintentional empathy for pain: empathy that occurs despite intentions to the contrary. We developed the pain identification task (PIT), a sequential priming task wherein participants judge the painfulness of target experiences while trying to avoid the influence of prime experiences.

Low heart rate as a risk factor for child and adolescent proactive aggressive and impulsive psychopathic behavior.

Although low resting heart rate has been viewed as a well-replicated biological correlate of child and adolescent antisocial behavior, little is known about how it interacts with psychosocial adversity in predisposing to both reactive-proactive aggression and psychopathy, and whether this relationship generalizes to an East Asian population. This study tests the hypothesis that low resting heart rate will be associated with aggression and psychopathic traits, and that heart rate will interact with adversity in predisposing to these antisocial traits. Resting heart rate was assessed in 334 Hong Kong male and female schoolchildren aged 11-17 years.

Implicit and explicit affect toward food and weight stimuli in anorexia nervosa.

We know strikingly little about the core affective processes that drive the development and maintenance of, and recovery from anorexia nervosa (AN). To partially address this knowledge gap, we measured implicit and explicit affect toward pleasant, neutral, unpleasant, food-relevant, and weight-relevant images in three groups: in patients with acute AN, individuals recovered from AN, and healthy controls with no history of AN. Compared with the other two groups, acutely ill AN participants displayed significantly greater implicit positive affect toward pleasant images and significantly greater implicit negative affect toward unpleasant, high-calorie food, and overweight body type images.