By Katherine Harmon | Scientific American "If love is said to come from the heart, what about hate? Along with music, religion, irony and a host of other complex concepts, researchers are on the hunt for the neurological underpinnings of hatred. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun...

By Veronique Greenwood "In a famous set of experiments in the 1970s, children were observed trick-or-treating in the suburbs. Some were asked their names and addresses upon arriving at a door, while some were asked nothing. All were instructed to take just one piece of candy from the bowl, but as...

By Jennifer Ruark "Many scholars labor in obscurity, but the researchers presenting their work this summer at a meeting of the International Positive Psychology Association had no such problem: More than 1,500 people from 52 countries came to listen. They packed the ballroom of the Philadelphia...

The Good, The Bad, and The Social by John Cacioppo and Bill Patrick "This past year, Chicagoans have heard the uplifting rhetoric of now-President Obama at Grant Park in November and the surrealistic explanations of now-impeached Governor Blagojevich for his alleged attempts to sell gubernatorial...

Jan 13, 2008 by Steven Pinker "Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it's an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta...

The following is a description of the VIA Institute on Character, which offers a survey revealing one's character strengths, among which is virtue. Source: www.viacharacter.org Dr. Christopher Peterson, from the University of Michigan, and one of the most cited psychologists of our time, was brought...

By Candace L. Upton "Aristotle was acutely aware of the importance of moral psychological observations to virtue ethics. In his brief discussion of bravery in the Nicomachean Ethics, he makes at least ten explicit empirical claims about the actual psychological states and abilities of moral agents...

By Jesse Prinz "Situationists argue that virtue ethics is empirically untenable, since traditional virtue ethicists postulate broad, efficacious character traits, and social psychology suggests that such traits do not exist. I argue that prominent philosophical replies to this challenge do not succeed...

By Joris Lammers and Diederik A. Stapel "The authors conducted 5 studies to test the idea that both thinking about and having power affects the way in which people resolve moral dilemmas. It is shown that high power increases the use of rule-based (deontological) moral thinking styles, whereas low...

By Cheshire Calhoun "That human beings make commitments of various sorts might seem so obviously a good thing that the question “What good is commitment?” might be thought to ask merely after the kind or kinds of good that commitment affords. To that question, one might respond that commitment is...

Lanzoni, Susan "The article discusses the account of emotion which highlights the bodily and physiological constitution of various feeling-states. It highlights the role of sympathy, which was most often understood to be a kind of tenderheartedness linked to, but distinct from love, in the debates...

Abstract: Research across disciplines suggests that bad is stronger than good and that individuals punish deception more than they reward honesty. However, methodological issues in previous research limit the latter conclusion. Three experiments resolved these issues and consistently found the opposite...

Huajian Cai , Qiuping Wu , Jonathon D. Brown In a provocative article, Heine et al. concluded that self-esteem needs are less important in collectivistic, East Asian countries than in individualistic, Western ones. Their conclusion was based, in part, on evidence that: (i) self-esteem scores are less...

Abstract: The question of why people are motivated to act altruistically has been an important one for centuries, and across various disciplines. Drawing on previous research on moral regulation, we propose a framework suggesting that moral (or immoral) behavior can result from an internal balancing...

Abstract: How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Haidt & Graham, 2007), we developed several ways to measure people’s use of five sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority...

Abstract: Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine whether fairness assessed in a widely used multisource instrument written by practitioners possessed a similar factor structure as fairness measured in academic literature, and whether different groups based on their relationship to the ratee...