ArticleClinical neuropsychiatry2021
Deontological Guilt and Disgust Sensitivity Modulate Moral Behaviour.
Article in Clinical neuropsychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 13 citations in OpenAlex.
- Permissibility, Moral Emotions, and Perceived Moral Agency in Autonomous Driving Dilemmas: An Investigation of Pedestrian-Sacrifice and Driver-Sacrifice Scenarios in the Third-Person Perspective.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Risk management during times of health uncertainty in Spain: A qualitative analysis of ethical challenges.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2025Article
- The impact of shared sense of agency and moral dispositions on intergroup dishonesty.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2025Article
- The Role of Childhood Experiences in the Development of Disgust Sensitivity: A Preliminary Study on Early Moral Memories.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2023Article
- Morality in the flesh: on the link between bodily self-consciousness, moral identity and (dis)honest behaviour.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Reduced ownership over a virtual body modulates dishonesty.iScience · 2022Article
- Deontological Guilt Differentially Affects Moral Behaviour in Participants With and Without Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).Clinical psychology & psychotherapyArticle
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveDeontological Guilt (DG), and Altruistic Guilt (AG) emerge from the appraisal of violating an internalized rule or an altruistic principle, respectively. DG is strictly connected with Disgust Sensitivity and plays a key role in the development and maintenance of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Previous studies investigated how DG affects responses to hypothetical moral dilemmas, however how DG and Disgust Sensitivity interact modulating moral behavior is still unknown.
methodsSTUDY 1. 46 healthy participants performed an ecological paradigm in which people can spontaneously decide to lie to obtain a reward (egoistic lie) or give it away (altruistic lie) after three emotional inductions: DG, AG or neutral. Furthermore, OCD traits, Morality, Guilt Propensity and Disgust Sensitivity were assessed by means of questionnaires. STUDY 2. 27 participants from the original sample were retested during the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy to ascertain whether the pandemic modified traits related to morality, disgust, guilt or OCD symptoms and whether these changes modulated moral behavior (measured by a task in which cheating was associated to higher pay-offs).
resultsSTUDY 1. Compared to the neutral, after the DG induction participants produced less altruistic and more egoistic lies. This effect was stronger in participants with high Disgust Sensitivity. STUDY 2. During the COVID-19 lockdown participants became more sensitive to the Authority pillar of the Moral Foundations and more sensitive to Disgust: this increment in deontological morality affected (im) moral behavior depending on changes in Disgust Sensitivity.
conclusionsOur data suggest that people with high Disgust Sensitivity are more affected by deontological inductions which translate to higher immorality, supposedly by lowering their moral self-image. These results might have important clinical implications as they suggest that addressing Disgust Sensitivity in therapy, might also decrease the effect of guilt on patients' behavior.
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