The Processing Process Of Aesthetic Judgment And Moral Judgment: The Study Of Behavior And ERP

Aesthetic judgments and moral judgments are usually considered as two different thinking activities.People think that aesthetics is a special form of how human understanding the world.It means that people and the world(society and nature)form a state of non-utilitarian,iconic,and emotional relationships;morality is to judge the goodness of events,behaviors,and people.However,empirical research shows that there may be some specific link between them.Brain imaging studies have shown that aesthetic and moral judgments activate certain common brain areas,such as orbitofrontal cortex and insular cortex,and biological and evolutionary psychology studies have shown that these two are not independent and there may be some specific relations.This study explores the processing activities and the characteristics of brain electrical activity in the comparison of aesthetic judgments and moral judgments through behavioral experiments and event-related potentials(ERPs).The research results have certain reference value for the related research in the field of aesthetic judgment and moral judgment.In the behavioral experiment study,the paradigm of implicit association test and e-prime software were used to compile experimental procedures and recorded the behavior data of 55 college students(30 males and 25 females)completing a vocabulary judgment task,which contains 60 aesthetic vocabularies(including 30 idioms representing beauty,30 idioms representing ugliness),60 moral lexicons(including 30 ethical idioms with good morality,and 30 idioms with bad morality),examining the reaction time to the combined judgment of aesthetic idioms(representative of beautiful and ugly idioms)and moral idioms(representing good and bad idioms).The combination of beautiful and good moral,ugly and bad moral terms is referred to as a compatible vocabulary combination,while the combination of beautiful and good moral,ugly and bad moral terms is referred to as an incompatible vocabulary combination.The results show that the testers reacted faster on judging the compatible vocabulary combinations rather than the vocabulary combinations of incompatible combinations.It turns out that,in hidden processing process,the beauty is easier connected with the good,and the ugliness is easier connected with the bad.In the EEG experiment study,brain electricity data of 18 college students(12 girls,6 boys)were collected.The experimental materials includes aesthetic vocabulary(including beauty and ugliness),moral vocabulary(including good morality and bad morality)and five types of neutral vocabulary.Considering that there may be differences in the electroencephalographic response to true words and spurious words,only electroencephalographic responses to the true words are analyzed,and three time window were selected:80-160ms,180-330ms and 780-980ms.The corresponding components named after the peak latency were N100,P230,and N950.There was no significant difference in the average amplitude of N100 for different types of vocabulary.In the time window of 180-330ms,there was a significant difference in the brain wave amplitude induced by different types of vocabulary.There are significant differences between the types of ugly idioms type and the types of neutral idioms.There is no significant difference between the beauty,good morality idioms and ugly,bad morality idioms.The 25 electrode points were divided into two groups:front-center,rear-center,left-right as two-factor analysis.In addition,the idiom type was a third factor analysis of variance.The results showed that in the front electrode points,there are significant differences when five idiom types were compared in pairs.There was no significant difference in the time window of 780-980ms.The results of behavioral research found that the relationship between beauty and good,ugliness and badness is more consistent,and EEG experiments have found that similar waveforms of brainwaves induced by beauty and ugliness as well as good and bad,it indicates that they may involve the same or similar processes.This study shows that aesthetic judgment and moral judgment are consistent.