The present study attempted to validate three sets of stimuli to assess moral judgment and theory of mind (ToM) to the Portuguese population. These sets of stimuli are widely used in social neuroscience to assess the psychological and neurobiological processes underlying these two main components of social cognition, which are determinant to successful social interactions.
More specifically, moral judgment is explored by a moral decision-making test composed by ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ dilemmas (Greene et al., 2008), which allow to study the processes underlying the morality, as well as to demonstrate abnormal utilitarian moral judgment in clinical and forensic populations. Furthermore, a set of visual morally laden scenarios depicting intentional and accidental harmful actions are used to characterize real-time neural processing underpinning moral computations (Decety and Cacioppo, 2012).
ToM refers to the ability to represent other’s mental states. Derntl and colleagues (2010) used a paradigm composed by scenarios showing the social interaction of two Caucasians. The face of one person was masked and participants should infer its corresponding emotional expression.