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Narcissism is a prevalent personality trait associated with low concern for others and high self-focus. Congruently, reduced automatic imitation in narcissists was reported in one study (23 participants), but it was not replicated in another (57 participants). In this study, 100 participants completed the previously used narcissism and automatic imitation measures but here along with a visual perspective-taking task allowing to dissociate 4 profiles of perspective-takers. While we confirmed a non-replication at whole-sample level, we did find a reliable negative association between narcissism and automatic imitation among egocentric perspective-takers, that is, characterized as highly self-centered when tasked to adopt someone else's point of view. Our findings shed a new light on whether narcissistic individuals are less sensitive to others, highlight the importance of considering performance-based individual differences within the narcissistic personality, and revisit the recent claim that automatic imitation poorly relates to social functioning by presenting a theoretical framework that questions the sensitivity of the automatic imitation task.

Moral judgements are crucial for social life and rely on the analysis of the agent’s intention and the outcome of the agent’s action. The current study examines to the influence of how the information is presented on moral judgement. The first experiment investigated the effects of the order in which intention and outcome information was presented. The results showed that participants relied more on the last presented information, suggesting a recency effect. The second experiment required participants to make two types of judgments (wrongness vs. punishment) and manipulated the order of the requested two types of judgments. Results showed an asymmetrical transfer effect whereby punishment judgements, but not wrongness judgements were affected by the order of presentation. This asymmetrical transfer effect was likely linked to the ambiguity of the punishment judgement. Altogether, the study showed that the order in which information was presented and the order in which one was asked to think about the wrongness of an action or the punishment that the action deserves were two factors that should be irrelevant, but actually influenced moral judgements. The influence of these factors was mostly observed during the most difficult judgements, precisely in situations where human decision is called upon, such as in court trials.

Every day, we engage in social interactions with other people which require understanding their as well as our own mental states. Such capacity is commonly referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). Disturbances of ToM are often reported in diverse pathologies which affect brain functioning and lead to problems in social interactions. Identifying ToM deficits is thus crucial to guide the clinicians in the establishment of adequate rehabilitation strategies for patients. Previous studies have demonstrated that ToM is not a unitary function yet currently there are very few standardized tests which allow identifying the type of cognitive processes affected when a patient exhibits a ToM deficit. In the current study, we present two belief reasoning tasks which have been used in previous research to disentangle two types of processes involved in belief reasoning: self-perspective inhibition and the spontaneous inference of another person's belief. A three-step procedure was developed to provide clinicians with the tools to interpret the patients' performances on the tasks. First, these tasks were standardized and normative data was collected on a sample of 124 healthy participants aged between 18 and 74. Data collected showed a decrease in performance as a function of age only in the task that loaded most in spontaneous other-perspective demands. There was however no effect of gender or educational level. Cut-off scores to identify deficits were then calculated for the different age groups separately. Secondly, the three-step procedure was applied to 21 brain-damaged patients and showed a large diversity of profiles, including selective deficits of the two targeted ToM processes. The diversity of profiles shows the importance to take into account the multiple facets of ToM during the diagnosis and rehabilitation of patients with suspected ToM deficits.

Recently, a few transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) or transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) studies have shown that the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) plays a causal role in moral reasoning especially in cases of accidental harms or failed attempted harms. The profile of results across studies is however not entirely consistent: sometimes the stimulation affects predominantly failed attempted harms while sometimes the stimulation affects predominantly accidental harms. We argue that such discrepancy could reflect different functional contributions of the rTPJ in moral judgments and that the chosen design parameters or stimulation method may differentially bring to light one or the other functional role of the rTPJ. In the current study, we found that tDCS specifically affected accidental harms but not failed attempted harms. Low cathodal stimulation of the rTPJ led to a marginally significant increase in the severity of judgments of accidental harms (Experiment 1) while higher cathodal current intensity led to a highly significant decrease in the severity of judgments of accidental harms (Experiment 2). Our pattern of results in the context of our experimental design can best be explained by a causal role of the rTPJ in processing the mitigating circumstances which reduce a protagonist’s moral responsibility. We discuss these results in relation to the idea that the rTPJ may play multiple roles in moral cognition and in relation to methodological aspects related to the use of tDCS.

The neurohormone Oxytocin (OT) has been one of the most studied peptides in behavioral sciences over the past two decades. Many studies have suggested that OT could increase trusting behaviors. A previous study, based on the "Envelope Task" paradigm, where trust is assessed by the degree of openness of an envelope containing participant's confidential information, showed that OT increases trusting behavior and reported one of the most powerful effects of OT on a behavioral variable. In this paper we present two failed replications of this effect, despite sufficient power to replicate the original large effect. The non-significant results of these two failed replications clearly exclude a large effect of OT on trust in this paradigm but are compatible with either a null effect of OT on trust, or a small effect, undetectable with small sample size (N = 95 and 61 in Study 1 and 2, respectively). Taken together, our results question the purported size of OT's effect on trust and emphasize the need for replications.