Digital Media Confuse the Moral Compass

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- The fast pace of digital media may confuse a person's moral compass by taking away much-needed time for reflection, new research shows.

In a study conducted at the University of Southern California, researchers used brain imaging to study volunteers' emotional responses to stories that caused either admiration or compassion. The imaging showed volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of virtue or social pain, but once those responses arose, they lasted far longer than volunteers' reactions to stories about physical pain.

Experts say the findings should cause concern over the potential emotional cost of rapidly firing pieces of information found on TV, online feeds or social networking sites.

"If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states, and that would have implications for your morality," first author of the study Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute in Los Angeles, Calif., was quoted as saying.

The study also revealed the emotion of admiration engages primal neural systems that regulate blood chemistry, the digestive system and other parts of the body, as well as posteromedial cortex, a hub in the brain related to the sense of self and consciousness.

SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition

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