ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2022
Indignation for moral violations suppresses the tongue motor cortex: preliminary TMS evidence.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The influence of olfactory stimuli on social cognition, prejudice and emotions: a systematic review of the literature.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Pooled it
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- Linkage Among Cognition, Emotion and Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Understanding COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: A Neuroscientific Protocol.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Corticobulbar activity in healthy humans and Parkinson's disease: a study protocol for a novel biomarker of motivational arousal.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The Role of Serotonin in Fear Learning and Memory: A Systematic Review of Human Studies.Brain sciences · 2023Review
- Gut-Brain Interaction Disorders and Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathological Asset, Disgust, and Gastrointestinal Symptoms.Nutrients · 2023Article
- Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation for the Modulation of Aggressive Behavior-A Systematic Review of Randomized Sham-Controlled Studies.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Relationship Between Sensitivity to Disgust and Irritable Bowel Syndrome: A Study on Healthy Individuals.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2022Article
- Motor Resonance Flexibility to Emotion-Enriched Context in Parkinson's Disease Patients.Behavioural neurology · 2022Article
- A Missing Voice: The Lingual Complex and Osteopathic Manual Medicine in the Context of Five Osteopathic Models.Cureus · 2021Review
- How Self-Control Predicts Moral Decision Making: An Exploratory Study on Healthy Participants.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Neuroethics: what the study of brain disorders can tell about moral behavior.AIMS neuroscience · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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Abstract
We commonly label moral violations in terms of 'disgust', yet it remains unclear whether metaphorical expressions linking disgust and morality are genuinely shared at the cognitive/neural level. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we provide new insights into this debate by measuring motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) from the tongue generated by TMS over the tongue primary motor area (tM1) in a small group of healthy participants presented with vignettes of moral transgressions and non-moral vignettes. We tested whether moral indignation, felt while evaluating moral vignettes, affected tM1 excitability. Vignettes exerted a variable influence on MEPs with no net effect of the moral category. However, in accordance with our recent study documenting reduced tM1 excitability during exposure to pictures of disgusting foods or facial expressions of distaste, we found that the vignettes of highly disapproved moral violations reduced tM1 excitability. Moreover, tM1 excitability and moral indignation were linearly correlated: the higher the moral indignation, the lower the tM1 excitability. Respective changes in MEPs were not observed in a non-oral control muscle, suggesting a selective decrease of tM1 excitability. These preliminary findings provide neurophysiological evidence supporting the hypothesis that morality might have originated from the more primitive experience of oral distaste.
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