Transforming the Unseen: Diminishing Negative Emotions Alters Implicit Moral Attitudes Without Affecting Subjective Moral Judgments or Justice Sensitivity

Moral attitudes and evaluations were once considered to emerge solely from rational thought. Nevertheless, recent neuropsychological studies show that these moral attributes are significantly influenced by emotion, particularly negative emotionality. Further psychopharmacological research has observed that GABAergic agonists are capable of influencing moral decision-making by modifying anxiety-related emotional negativity and/or through cognitive modulation. The aim of this double-blind, crossover design, placebo-controlled study is to evaluate said GABAergic modulation on moral cognition. Importantly, unlike the aforementioned research, the present study not only utilizes explicit moral evaluation measures (e.g., JSI and evaluations of moral scenarios), but also uses the morality Implicit Association Test (mIAT) to assess unacknowledged attitudes towards morally charged scenarios. Our results show that acute lorazepam administration significantly decreases mIAT D-scores in the High-D group, while having no effect on the Low-D group. Significant differences regarding the other-oriented JSI were observed between groups, with lorazepam administration exhibiting a marginal trend towards significance. These findings not only confirm GABAergic activity modulation on moral cognition (including implicit mechanisms), but also suggest such modulation promotes pro-social behavior. Altogether, this study supports the dynamic system model of moral cognition, where explicit rational deliberative operations interplay with implicit emotional processes during moral decision-making.