CONSEQUENCES OF MORAL DECISION-MAKING: SELF-REGULATORY PERSEVERATION ON MORAL CONCERNS FOLLOWING MORAL BEHAVIOR VIOLATIONS, The
Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: Moral injury has been identified as a type of trauma outcome often reported in military and veteran populations that stems from perpetrating, being victim of, or bearing witness to acts or events that violate deeply held moral beliefs, values, and expectations about the world and the self. Exposure to these moral traumatic experiences result in adverse psychological outcomes that overlap with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, but are uniquely characterized by overwhelming feelings of shame and guilt, demoralization, and even parasuicidal behaviors. Indeed, service members are often faced with high-stakes moral dilemmas during warfare that require split-second decisions where their behavior may diverge from personal moral standards. Self-regulatory perseveration theory suggests that when people are faced with an irreducible discrepancy between a behavioral standard and their actual behavior, they may become stuck in a self-regulatory cycle, particularly when the standard is an important source of self-worth. This inability to exit the cycle results in perseverated focus on the loss of the important source of self-worth, thus exhausting cognitive resources from other regulatory functions and acting as the impetus for maladaptive psychopathological processes. This study utilized an experimental paradigm to assess if discrepancies between the moral self and moral behavior following a moral dilemma decision-making task increase perseveration on moral concerns, and lead to maladaptive self-conscious moral emotions in a sample of military veterans and active-duty service members.
Author: Andrea M. Yetzer
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3136389657