ABSTRACT
Moral beliefs of what is good or bad govern everyday social interactions but vary across cultures in laying stress on either individuals' rights/needs or social obligation/group goals. Moral judgments on social behavior have been associated with several neural networks in which activities support social cognition and emotion and are shaped by cultural experiences. This chapter reviews brain imaging findings of neural networks engaged in moral judgments and cultural neuroscience research that reveals differences in neural activities in these networks involved in social cognition and emotion between East Asian and Western cultures. These cultural neuroscience findings provide new insights into cognitive and neural bases of moral judgments of social behaviors. Implications of the cultural neuroscience findings for moral belief construction are also discussed.
