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Understanding morality is central to understanding human behavior, cognition, and culture.
Narratives, one of the oldest forms of human expression, frequently convey moral themes that
resonate with audiences across time and location. This talk first delves into moral representations,
exploring their essence, methods for identification, and practical applications. I will define moral
representations as the ways in which moral principles, values, and conflicts are depicted in textual
and audio-visual narratives, and encoded in the human brain. Drawing on Moral Foundations
Theory (MFT) and Morality as Cooperation Theory (MAC), I will introduce into the complexity
of extracting moral representations from stories with high reliability and validity. Next, I will
present a dissociable, sensitive and specific neural signature of moral representations, focusing on
the centuries old question of whether the human brain uses domain general or specialized networks
to process moral information. In addition, I will demonstrate how the severity of moral wrongness
judgments can be decoded from this neural signature. Finally, I provide examples of how moral
representations can be used to predict diverse human cognitions and media use behaviors ranging
from the choice of language to news sharing behavior, misinformation detection, and story
engagement. By the end of the presentation, I hope that the audience will gain a deeper appreciation
of moral representations as a critical mechanism that shapes our relationship with narratives and
our broader social world.