Shared brain activity for aesthetic and moral judgments: implications for the Beauty-is-Good stereotype

Shared brain activity for aesthetic and moral judgments: implications for the Beauty-is-Good stereotype
Takashi Tsukiura and Roberta Cabeza; 2010
http://intl-scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/6/1/138.full


Abstract

The Beauty-is-Good stereotype refers to the assumption that attractive people possess sociably desirable personalities and higher moral standards. The existence of this bias suggests that the neural mechanisms for judging facial attractiveness and moral goodness overlap. To investigate this idea, we scanned participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they made attractiveness judgments about faces and goodness judgments about hypothetical actions. Activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex increased as a function of both attractiveness and goodness ratings, whereas activity in the insular cortex decreased with both attractiveness and goodness ratings. Within each of these regions, the activations elicited by attractiveness and goodness judgments were strongly correlated with each other, supporting the idea of similar contributions of each region to both judgments. Moreover, activations in orbitofrontal and insular cortices were negatively correlated with each other, suggesting an opposing relationship between these regions during attractiveness and goodness judgments. These findings have implications for understanding the neural mechanisms of the Beauty-is-Good stereotype.

Individual differences in personality traits reflect structural variance in specific brain regions

Individual differences in personality traits reflect structural variance in specific brain regions
Simona Gardini et al., 2009
https://syllabus.byu.edu/uploads/gkhHMK7hTKYu.pdf


Abstract

 

Personality dimensions such as novelty seeking (NS), harm avoidance (HA), reward dependence (RD) and persistence (PER) are said to be heritable, stable across time and dependent on genetic and neurobiological factors. Recently a better understanding of the relationship between personality traits and brain structures/systems has become possible due to advances in neuroimaging techniques. This Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) study investigated if individual differences in these personality traits reflected structural variance in specific brain regions. A large sample of eighty five young adult participants completed the Three-dimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) and had their brain imaged with MRI. A voxel-based correlation analysis was carried out between individuals’ personality trait scores and grey matter volume values extracted from 3D brain scans. NS correlated positively with grey matter volume in frontal and posterior cingulate regions. HA showed a negative correlation with grey matter volume in orbito-frontal, occipital and parietal structures. RD was negatively correlated with grey matter volume in the caudate nucleus and in the rectal frontal gyrus. PER showed a positive correlation with grey matter volume in the precuneus, paracentral lobule and parahippocampal gyrus. These results indicate that individual differences in the main personality dimensions of NS, HA, RD and PER, may reflect structural variance in specific brain areas.

Are moral virtues attractive?

Sexual selection for moral virtues
Geoffrey F. Miller, 2007

http://hss.caltech.edu/~steve/miller.pdf



A few points of the paper:

"Research shows that many particular moral virtues are sexually attractive and relationship-stabilizing; these include: [kindness, empathy, niceness, honesty, heroism]; Most of these moral virtue preferences are stronger when seeking a serious long-term partner than a short-term lover."

"All else being equal, virtues should be favored in mate choice. They should be highly valued aspects of potential mates that individuals are motivated not just to judge passively by observation, but to probe actively..."

"One might object that intelligence is not really a moral virtue; it just happens to predict a wide range of specific moral behaviors. Yet, what is a moral virtue if not an individual differences dimension that predicts a wide range of specific moral behaviors? Moral virtues are socially attributed traits that carry predictive information about morally relevant behaviors. If kindness is a moral virtue because it predicts specific prosocial behaviors, and is valued as such, then intelligence must also be a moral virtue, along with being an academic, economic, and epistemological virtue. Another reason for accepting the quasi-moral status of intelligence is the recent convergence between virtue ethics and “virtue epistemology,” the study of cognitive and intellectual virtues (Axtell 2000; Brady and Pritchard 2003; DePaul and Zagzebski 2003). Traditional epistemology tried to evaluate the truth of particular conceptual systems through consistency and coherence criteria. By contrast, for the virtue epistemologist, true beliefs arise from acts of intellectual virtue, those typical of intelligent, rational, cognitively complex agents (Zagzebski 1996) who show impartiality, epistemic responsibility, and intellectual courage (Code 1987; Kvanvig 1992; Montmarquet 1993). For example, Aristotle named intuition, wisdom, prudence, and science as intellectual virtues. In virtue epistemology as in virtue ethics, the favored level of description is the whole individual as a cognitive/moral agent, not the isolated belief or moral act. This naturally leads to an emphasis on individual differences in epistemological virtue, differences that intelligence researchers have already succeeded in measuring with unparalleled reliability and validity for over a century ( Jensen 1998). Thus, intelligence is a sexually attractive, quasimoral trait at the intersection of virtue epistemology and virtue ethics."