Acute psychosocial stress and everyday moral decision-making: behavioral effects, psychoneuroendocrinological responses, and neuronal activity

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In everyday life, moral decisions frequently need to be made under acute stress. Although there is empirical evidence that both stress and stress hormones affect decision-making in various domains including economic, social, and abstract moral decision-making, surprisingly few attempts have been made to explore the effects of stress on everyday moral decision-making. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is to experimentally investigate the thesis that acute psychosocial stress influences decision-making in everyday moral conflict situations in both men and women.With this application for continuated funding of the proposal (sign removed), we apply for an extension of staff appropriations from 30 to 36 months. The original project comprised two main studies. In a first main experimental laboratory study, we investigated the impact of acute psychosocial stress on everyday moral decision-making applying for the first time a within-subjects design (results available). In a second main experimental study, we aim to examine behavioral effects and, for the first time, neuronal activation patterns during everyday moral decision-making after acute stress exposure using fMRI (data collection still outstanding). For main study 2, an essential prerequisite was the development and establishment of new fMRI compatible paradigms (placebo version of the ScanSTRESS paradigm and moral decision-making paradigm). These new paradigm developments have been successfully accomplished by now. Though, this process turned out to be much more complex (with regard to content as well as technically) and especially more time-consuming than originally planned. Simultaneously to main study 1 and the preparatory works for main study 2, we successfully pursued the following additional research questions: After the development of new stimulus material for both main studies, four independent validation studies have been conducted. This led to the establishment of the EMCS Scale (published in Singer et al., 2019). In an additional behavioral study (between-subjects design), we investigated the time dependency of stress effects on everyday moral decision-making (Singer et al., in preparation). Since the results of main study 1 (within-subjects design) did not confirm the expected stress effects on everyday moral decision-making, we additionally conducted a replication of main study 1 (Singer et al., in preparation). With this application for continuated funding of staff appropriations for 6 months, the still outstanding main study 2 will be conducted.