Temporal Dynamics of Moral Semantic Processing in Chinese: An ERP Study of Word Categorization

Morality serves as a universal code of behavior and a foundation for social value systems. To investigate the cognitive architecture of moral information processing, the present study adopted event-related potentials (ERPs). We used Chinese moral words as stimuli to characterize the temporal neural dynamics of moral processing. Fifty-four participants completed a one-way repeated-measures lexical categorization task with four conditions (moral, immoral, neutral, and pseudowords), including response mapping as a between-subjects factor. Behavioral responses and electroencephalography (EEG) activity were recorded simultaneously. Behavioral analyses yielded robust response latency disparities: participants categorized moral words most rapidly, followed by neutral words and immoral words; pseudowords elicited the slowest responses. ERP analyses revealed graded neural signatures across stimulus categories. During the P2 window (150–250 ms), immoral words elicited the largest amplitudes. At the N3 component (250–350 ms), real words showed attenuated negativity compared with pseudowords, and moral words also differed from neutral words, suggesting that N3 reflects lexical-semantic categorization with additional moral-relevance effects. At the LPP (400–800 ms), immoral words evoked the largest responses, significantly larger than those for neutral and pseudowords, whereas the moral–immoral contrast was not significant. Collectively, these results are consistent with an affective-moral salience account: moral words show a behavioral recognition advantage, and immoral words elicit heightened early and late neurocognitive sensitivity. The findings highlight the utility of ERP analysis for mapping moral semantic processing within the logographic Chinese writing system, and may inform future cross-cultural neurocognitive research and semantic decoding in brain–computer interface paradigms.