Intrinsic functional connectivity of medial prefrontal cortex predicts the individual moral bias in economic valuation p
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Intrinsic functional connectivity of medial prefrontal cortex predicts the individual moral bias in economic valuation partially through the moral sensitivity trait Jie Liu 1,2 & Binke Yuan 1,3,4 & Yue-jia Luo 1,2,3 & Fang Cui 1,2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract An individual’s economic valuation of a given object is biased by the moral status of the persons to whom the object is attached. The neural basis for how such “moral bias” occurs, especially how it is maintained in the resting state, are largely unknown. In the current study, we explored this question by correlating the functional connectivity with participants’ behavioral performance measured in a novel task which captured how the economic valuation was influenced by given moral information. Seed-based FC analysis showed that the functional connectivity between the mPFC and the orbital mPFC (omPFC), the mPFC and the precuneus, the mPFC and the left anterior cingulum, were significantly associated with the behavioral index of morality effect on economic valuation. Multivariate machine learning-based regression analysis showed that connections in the mPFC network, as well as in the putamen network could well predict the behavior performance, indicating that this mPFC network and the putamen network were crucial for this moral bias. Our results further revealed that the individuals’ personal trait of moral sensitivity served as a mediator between the rsFC of mPFC network and the behavioral index of morality effect on economic valuation. Keywords Economic valuation . Moral sensitivity . mPFC . Functional connectivity . Resting-state fMRI
Introduction When valuing an object, not only its look, quality and practicality would be taken into consideration, its “morality” would be considered as well. An object related to someone who is saliently moral/immoral would be affixed with a “moral tag”. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-019-00152-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Fang Cui [email protected] 1
College of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
2
Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Affective and Social Cognitive Science, Shenzhen University, Nanhai Ave 3688, Shenzhen 518060, Guangdong, China
3
Center for Brain Disorders and Cognitive Science, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
4
Center for Language and Brain, Shenzhen Institute of Neuroscience, Shenzhen, China
The individual’s economic valuation of the object would be “biased” by this moral tag. Behavioral studies have found that the “moral tag” affect individuals’ decisions in multiple contexts (e.g. purchase decisions; auction of celerity belongings) such that individuals valued objects more if they were associated with moral people and less if they were associated with immoral people (Hood et al. 2011; Kramer and lock Kramer and lock 2011; Newman and Bloom 2014). These findings suggest that the economic
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