ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2018
Looking up to virtue: averting gaze facilitates moral construals via posteromedial activations.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- In the blink of an eye: behavioural correlates of the confirmation bias effect.Cognitive processing · 2025Article
- Transcendent thinking counteracts longitudinal effects of mid-adolescent exposure to community violence in the anterior cingulate cortex.Journal of research on adolescence : the official journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence · 2025Article
- Diverse adolescents' transcendent thinking predicts young adult psychosocial outcomes via brain network development.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Growing Brains, Nurturing Minds-Neuroscience as an Educational Tool to Support Students' Development as Life-Long Learners.Brain sciences · 2022Review
- Default and executive networks' roles in diverse adolescents' emotionally engaged construals of complex social issues.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Prosocial Orientation of Russians During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Caring for Others and Yourself.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response.Nature human behaviour · 2020Review
- An fMRI study of error monitoring in Montessori and traditionally-schooled children.NPJ science of learning · 2020Article
- Smarter Than Thou, Holier Than Thou: The Dynamic Interplay Between Cognitive and Moral Enhancement.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Witnessing exemplary actions triggers admiration, a positive emotion that can pertain to concrete skills, or move the onlooker beyond physical characteristics to appreciate the abstract, moral implications. Participants reacted to narratives depicting skilled or virtuous protagonists first during a videotaped interview then during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We analyzed participants' gaze aversion (an indicator of disengaging from the immediate environment) and cognitive construals (mentions of concrete characteristics vs abstract beliefs and values) during the interview, and relations to individuals' subsequent neural activations. When participants averted their gaze, they were more likely to mention abstract construals, and both behaviors were more likely when reacting to virtue. Gaze aversion to virtue narratives predicted greater subsequent activation for those narratives in dorsal posterior cingulate cortex (dPCC), involved in visual attention control. The inferior-posterior posteromedial cortices (ipPMC), a default mode network hub involved in abstract thought, activated only to virtue, and activity level reflected individuals' tendency to abstract construals. Critically, dPCC and ipPMC activity sequentially mediated the relationship between individuals' gaze and abstract construal tendencies. No such relationships existed for reactions to skill, despite participants reporting equivalently strong positive emotion. In appreciating virtue, dPCC may support individuals in transcending the viewable context, facilitating ipPMC activity and moral construals.
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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.