Selective impairment of cognitive empathy for moral judgment in adults with high functioning autism |
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Authors: | Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht Teresa Torralva Alexia Rattazzi Victoria Marenco María Roca Facundo Manes |
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Institution: | 1.Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Buenos Aires 1126, Argentina, 2.Institute of Neuroscience, Favaloro University, Buenos Aires 1093, Argentina and 3.Laboratory of Neurosciences, Diego Portales University, Santiago 8370179, Chile |
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Abstract: | Faced with a moral dilemma, conflict arises between a cognitive controlled response aimed at maximizing welfare, i.e. the utilitarian judgment, and an emotional aversion to harm, i.e. the deontological judgment. In the present study, we investigated moral judgment in adult individuals with high functioning autism/Asperger syndrome (HFA/AS), a clinical population characterized by impairments in prosocial emotions and social cognition. In Experiment 1, we compared the response patterns of HFA/AS participants and neurotypical controls to moral dilemmas with low and high emotional saliency. We found that HFA/AS participants more frequently delivered the utilitarian judgment. Their perception of appropriateness of moral transgression was similar to that of controls, but HFA/AS participants reported decreased levels of emotional reaction to the dilemma. In Experiment 2, we explored the way in which demographic, clinical and social cognition variables including emotional and cognitive aspects of empathy and theory of mind influenced moral judgment. We found that utilitarian HFA/AS participants showed a decreased ability to infer other people’s thoughts and to understand their intentions, as measured both by performance on neuropsychological tests and through dispositional measures. We conclude that greater prevalence of utilitarianism in HFA/AS is associated with difficulties in specific aspects of social cognition. |
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Keywords: | utilitarianism moral judgment social cognition emotion Asperger syndrome |
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