ArticleScientific reports2021
Psychopathic traits mediate guilt-related anterior midcingulate activity under authority pressure.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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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.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Psychopathy and medial frontal cortex: A systematic review reveals predominantly null relationships.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Pooled it
- Acute lorazepam administration does not significantly affect moral attitudes or judgments.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Born to Fear the Machine? Genetic and Environmental Influences on Negative Attitudes toward AI Agents.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- The Neural Signatures of Shame, Embarrassment, and Guilt: A Voxel-Based Meta-Analysis on Functional Neuroimaging Studies.Brain sciences · 2023Review
- The neural correlates of emotional conflict monitoring as an early manifestation of affective and cognitive declines in persons with Type 2 diabetes.Brain communications · 2023Article
- Neuromodulation of the right temporoparietal junction alters amygdala functional connectivity to authority pressure.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- Psychopathic and autistic traits differentially influence the neural mechanisms of social cognition from communication signals.Translational psychiatry · 2022Article
- Self-Conscious Emotions and the Right Fronto-Temporal and Right Temporal Parietal Junction.Brain sciences · 2022Review
- The anti-anxiety drug lorazepam changes implicit behaviors but not explicit evaluations of sense of agency under authoritative pressure: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Coercive power has different effects on individuals, and which were unable to be fully addressed in Milgram's famous studies on obedience to authority. While some individuals exhibited high levels of guilt-related anxiety and refused orders to harm, others followed coercive orders throughout the whole event. The lack of guilt is a well-known characteristic of psychopathy, and recent evidence portrays psychopathic personalities on a continuum of clustered traits, while being pervasive in a significant proportion in the population. To investigate whether psychopathic traits better explain discrepancies in antisocial behavior under coercion, we applied a virtual obedience paradigm, in which an experimenter ordered subjects to press a handheld button to initiate successive actions that carry different moral consequences, during fMRI scanning. Psychopathic traits modulated the association between harming actions and guilt feelings on both behavioral and brain levels. This study sheds light on the individual variability in response to coercive power.
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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.