ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2017
The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex mediates the interaction between moral and aesthetic valuation: a TMS study on the beauty-is-good stereotype.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Relational vs representational social cognitive processing: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging data.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Pooled it
- Partisan aesthetics: political orientation modulates aesthetic judgments of propaganda posters.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Equation for Attractiveness: Integrating Multidimensional Factors Through Computational Neuroaesthetics.Aesthetic plastic surgery · 2025Article
- Attraction is altered via modulation of the medial prefrontal cortex without explicit knowledge.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Binocularly suppressed stimuli induce brain activities related to aesthetic emotions.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Functional Segregation of the Human Cerebellum in Social Cognitive Tasks Revealed by TMS.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Negative implicit in-group stereotypes of Chinese male drug abusers: evidence from ERP.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2022Article
- Neural responses to facial attractiveness in the judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty.Brain structure & function · 2022Article
- Trait/Financial Information of Potential Male Mate Eliminates Mate-Choice Copying by Women: Trade-Off Between Social Information and Personal Information in Mate Selection.Archives of sexual behavior · 2021Article
- Hacking Trust: The Presence of Faces on Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) Affects Trustworthiness.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Influences of Social Distancing and attachment styles on the strength of the Halo Effect.PloS one · 2021Article
- An Analysis of the Generalizability and Stability of the Halo Effect During the COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Review of computational neuroaesthetics: bridging the gap between neuroaesthetics and computer science.Brain informatics · 2020Review
- Stimulation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex impacts conflict resolution in Level-1 visual perspective taking.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Medial prefrontal cortex involvement in aesthetic appreciation of paintings: a tDCS study.Cognitive processing · 2020Article
- Neural correlates of visual aesthetic appreciation: insights from non-invasive brain stimulation.Experimental brain research · 2020Review
- Swiping right: face perception in the age of Tinder.Heliyon · 2019Review
- Behavioural and Neural Responses to Facial Disfigurement.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- The neural correlates of integrated aesthetics between moral and facial beauty.Scientific reports · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Attractive individuals are perceived as possessing more positive personal traits than unattractive individuals. This reliance on aesthetic features to infer moral character suggests a close link between aesthetic and moral valuation. Here we aimed to investigate the neural underpinnings of the interaction between aesthetic and moral valuation by combining transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with a priming paradigm designed to assess the Beauty-is-Good stereotype. Participants evaluated the trustworthiness of a series of faces (targets), each of which was preceded by an adjective describing desirable, undesirable, or neutral aesthetic qualities (primes). TMS was applied between prime and target to interfere with activity in two regions known to be involved in aesthetic and moral valuation: the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC, a core region in social cognition) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC, critical in decision making). Our results showed that when TMS was applied over vertex (control) and over the dlPFC, participants judged faces as more trustworthy when preceded by positive than by negative aesthetic primes (as also shown in two behavioral experiments). However, when TMS was applied over the dmPFC, primes had no effect on trustworthiness judgments. A second Experiment corroborated this finding. Our results suggest that mPFC plays a causal role linking moral and aesthetic valuation.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.