Gender, age and culturally-specific beliefs are often considered relevant to observed variation in social interactions. At present, however, the scientific literature is mixed with respect to the significance of these factors in guiding moral judgments. In this study, we explore the role of each of these factors in moral judgment by presenting the results of a web-based study of Eastern (i.e., Russia) and Western (i.e., USA, UK, Canada) subjects, male and female, and young and old. Participants (n=659) responded to hypothetical moral scenarios describing situations where sacrificing one life resulted in saving five others. Though men and women from both types of cultures judged (1) harms caused by action as less permissible than harms caused by omission, (2) means-based harms as less permissible than side-effects, and (3) harms caused by contact as less permissible than by non-contact, men in both cultures delivered more utilitarian judgments (save the five, sacrifice one) than women. Moreover, men from Western cultures were more utilitarian than Russian men, with no differences observed for women. In both cultures, older participants delivered less utilitarian judgments than younger participants. These results suggest that certain core principles may mediate moral judgments across different societies, implying some degree of universality, while also allowing a limited range of variation due to sociocultural factors.

Cognitive load (CL) is one of the leading factors moderating states and performance among drivers. Heavily increased CL may contribute to the development of mental stress. Averaged heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) indices are shown to reflect CL levels in different tasks. The aim of this large-scale study was to explore how accurately HR and HRV metrics can differentiate between varying CL conditions during driving. Participants (N = 892, 44% female, from 18 to 79 years old) performed simulated driving in highway and urban scenarios. The n-back task was used as a mental distraction to further increase CL. The results have shown that increased CL was accompanied by higher HR, lower HRV, as measured by RMSSD, and higher HR complexity, as measured by permutation entropy. HR displayed the highest accuracy in discriminating between short windows (30 s) of different CL conditions, particularly highway versus urban driving and mental distraction during highway driving. We found gender and age effects on discriminative accuracy of HR and HRV metrics which were related to subjective ratings of CL. These results illustrate that HR and HRV indices provide a valid source for applications in the field of CL monitoring and mental stress detection.

Cardiac activity is involved in the processes of organization of goal-directed behaviour. Each behavioural act is aimed at achieving an adaptive outcome and it is subserved by the actualization of functional systems consisting of elements distributed across the brain and the rest of the body. This paper proposes a system-evolutionary view on the activity of the heart and its variability. We have compared the irregularity of the heart rate, as measured by sample entropy (SampEn), in behaviours that are subserved by functional systems formed at different stages of individual development, which implement organism-environment interactions with different degrees of differentiation. The results have shown that SampEn of the heart rate was higher during performing tasks that included later acquired knowledge (foreign language vs. native language; mathematical vocabulary vs. general vocabulary) and decreased in the stress and alcohol conditions, as well as at the beginning of learning. These results are in line with the hypothesis that irregularity of the heart rate reflects the properties of a set of functional systems subserving current behaviour, with higher irregularity corresponding to later acquired and more complex behaviour.

Individuals often deliver rapid, automatic judgments of right and wrong, suggesting that there is an implicit system of knowledge that may guide our moral judgments. Some authors have argued that the principles guiding this system are universal, part of our human endowment. Tests of this hypothesis require rich cross-cultural evidence which is presently limited. Here we extend the current cross-cultural evidence by testing Russian subjects. We focus on three psychological distinctions concerning the nature of permissible harm that, thus far, show a fair degree of uniformity among several English-speaking countries (USA, UK, Canada): (1) action-based harms are worse than omission-based harms; (2) means-based harms are worse than side-effects; and (3) contact-based harms are worse than non-contact-based harms. Overall, Russian subjects’ judgments were mediated by these three distinctions. There were, however, some notable cross-cultural differences: in contrast with the English-speaking countries, Russian subjects tended to avoid extreme judgments favoring the middle of the scale anchored at permissible; however, when they used the extremes, they were more likely to judge cases as forbidden, and rarely as obligatory. We discuss these results in light of the role of biological constraints on cross-cultural variation.

Despite a great progress in our understanding of alcohol influence on physiological processes and brain function, the mechanisms of alcohol effects on human social behaviour are still unclear. This work is focused on studying whether and how alcohol (ethanol, 1 g/kg) may affect evaluation of moral permissibility of harmful actions and the dynamics of heart rate characteristics during solving moral dilemmas. Subjects (n=40) were tested twice with the time interval of 2-4 months: once they assessed protagonists’ actions in moral dilemmas after drinking an alcoholic beverage and once – after drinking a non-alcoholic beverage (counterbalanced). The results showed that moral judgements did not always change under alcohol influence but when they did, responses shifted in different directions: some individuals began to judge harmful actions as less permissible while others began to judge them as more permissible. A negative correlation was shown between heart rate and time required for solving moral dilemmas in alcohol condition. Alcohol decreased heart rate variability, including a measure of complexity (ApEn). These results are in line with the view that alcohol intake causes a decrease in complexity of behaviour and its system organisation which may represent the general psychophysiological mechanism underlying various effects of alcohol on social behaviour. This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Humanities (project № 14-06-00680, «Formation of moral judgments as a mechanism of human adaptation for social and cultural environment in norm and under alcohol intoxica- tion») and was performed as part of a research programme of one of the leading scientific schools of Russian Federation «System Psychophysiology» (НШ-9808.2016.6).