The anti-anxiety drug lorazepam changes implicit behaviors but not explicit evaluations of sense of agency under authoritative pressure: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Acute lorazepam administration does not significantly affect moral attitudes or judgments

Recent scientific studies exploring the neuropsychological foundations of moral decision-making have shown that moral attitudes and evaluations are significantly influenced by emotion, particularly negative emotionality, as well as personality traits such as neuroticism. 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., the Justice Sensitivity Inventory (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 indicate that acute lorazepam administration does not significantly alter moral judgments, including implicit moral attitudes, explicit justice sensitivity, and blame/praise evaluations. Lorazepam-induced changes in moral sensitivity appeared to vary with baseline levels, with individuals exhibiting higher baseline JSI or D scores tending to show greater reductions following administration. These findings support the involvement of GABAergic modulation in moral cognition, albeit without clear behavioral consequences.

Negative emotionality downregulation affects moral choice but not moral judgement of harm: a pharmacological study

Previous neuroscientific research has expounded on the fundamental role played by emotion during moral decision-making. Negative emotionality has been observed to exert a general inhibitory effect towards harmful behaviors against others. Nevertheless, the downregulation of negative affects at different levels of moral processing (e.g. impersonal versus personal moral dilemmas) alongside its possible interactions with other factors (e.g. perspective taking) hasn't been directly assessed; both of which can assist in predicting future moral decision-making. In the present research, we empirically test (Study 1, N = 41) whether downregulating negative emotionality through pharmacological interventions using lorazepam (a GABA receptor agonist), modulate the permissibility of harm to others -i.e. if participants find it more morally permissible to harm others when harm is unavoidable (inevitable harm moral dilemmas), than when it may be avoided (evitable harm moral dilemmas). Furthermore, using another sample (Study 2, N = 31), we assess whether lorazepam's effect is modulated by different perspective-taking conditions during a moral dilemma task -e.g. "is it morally permissible for you to […]?" (1st person perspective), relative to "is it morally permissible for [x individual] to […]?" (3rd person perspective)-, where the outcome of the different scenarios is controlled. The results of both studies converge, revealing an emotion-dependent, rather than an outcome-dependent, pharmacological modulation. Lorazepam only influenced interpersonal moral judgments when not modulated by the evitable/inevitable condition. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between perspective-taking and drug administration, as lorazepam exerted a larger effect in modulating moral choices rather than moral judgements.