Trial reportPsychopharmacology2019
Moral decision making under modafinil: a randomized placebo-controlled double-blind crossover fMRI study.
Trial report in Psychopharmacology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed, 2 citations in OpenAlex.
- The impact of adolescent clinical depression and depressive symptoms on moral thinking: based on process dissociation approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
rationaleModafinil is increasingly used by healthy humans as a neuroenhancer in order to improve cognitive functioning. Research on the effects of modafinil on cognition yielded most consistent findings for complex tasks relying on the prefrontal cortex (PFC).
objectivesThe present randomized placebo-controlled double-blind crossover study aimed to investigate the effect of a single dose of modafinil (200 mg) on everyday moral decision making and its neural correlates, which have been linked to the ventro- and dorsomedial PFC.
methodsHealthy male study participants were presented with short stories describing everyday moral or neutral dilemmas. Each moral dilemma required a decision between a personal desire and a moral standard, while the neutral dilemmas required decisions between two personal desires. The participants underwent this task twice, once under the influence of modafinil and once under placebo. Brain activity associated with the processing of the dilemmas was assessed by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging.
resultsFor the processing of moral vs. neutral dilemmas, activations were found in a network of brain regions linked to social cognitive processes including, among others, the bilateral medial PFC, the insula, and the precuneus. Modafinil was found to increase the number of moral decisions and had no effect on brain activity associated with dilemma processing. Exploratory analyses revealed reduced response-locked activity in the dorsomedial PFC for moral compared to neutral dilemmas under modafinil, but not under placebo.
conclusionsThe results are discussed in terms of altered predictions of others' emotional states under modafinil, possibly due to higher processing efficiency.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.