Moral cognition about harm in anxiety disorders: The Importance of Experienced Emotion

Recent work has shown that emotional arousal influences decision-making in sacrificial moral dilemmas, with heightened levels of arousal associated with increased aversion to committing moral transgressions to maximize utilitarian outcomes. Patients with anxiety disorders experience pathologically heightened states of arousal and thus may be expected to exhibit reduced utilitarian responding on such dilemmas. Extant evidence has been mixed, however, regarding whether anxious patients differ in their moral decisions from controls, and no study has conducted a careful examination of emotions experienced during decision-making. We administered sacrificial moral dilemmas to a cohort of 95 patients from across the spectrum of anxiety disorders to test whether they differed from matched controls on a) utilitarian decision-making, and b) ratings of experienced emotion during the moral deliberative process. Results showed no group differences between patients and controls on endorsement of utilitarian sacrificial action or on reported experience of emotionality during the experiment. Additionally, exploratory analysis revealed that specific emotions were correlated with utilitarian judgments. These results are in line with the Dual Process Theory model’s prediction that decreased utilitarian responding will be concomitant with an increased emotional arousal. Our findings support past work indicating that moral cognition is intact in anxiety disorders despite the emotional dysregulation characteristic of anxious psychopathology. Future work would benefit from the use of process-dissociation techniques to further clarify whether emotional or cognitive processes may differ in anxiety disorders during moral cognition.