When people feel physically closer to someone who could be harmed, they are less willing to sacrifice that person for the greater good, according to a new finding reported in Cognition & Emotion.

Moral dilemmas, situations where any available option violates an important moral value, have been used to study how people balance rules like “do not harm” against outcomes like saving more lives. Classic examples such as the trolley and footbridge dilemmas show that people often reject utilitarian solutions when harm requires direct physical contact, suggesting that emotional responses play an important role in moral judgment.

The trolley dilemma is a thought experiment that asks whether it is morally permissible to pull a lever to divert a runaway train, sacrificing one person on a side track to save five people on the main line. The footbridge dilemma modifies this scenario by asking if one would physically push a large person off a bridge to stop the train, rather than using a mechanical switch.

Federica Alfeo and colleagues were motivated by an open question in this literature: is it the type of action (e.g., pushing versus pulling a lever), or the physical closeness to the victim, that drives these moral choices? Building on theories of psychological distance and prior work on emotion in decision-making, the authors set out to disentangle how proximity itself shapes moral judgments and emotional reactions.

The researchers conducted two studies using computer-based, interactive moral dilemmas modeled on the footbridge scenario. The scenarios were presented from a first-person perspective, allowing participants to experience the unfolding situation as if they themselves were at the scene.

In Study 1, 261 participants responded to scenarios that required different actions implying different levels of physical proximity to a victim: pushing someone directly, using a gun, or pulling a lever that opened a trapdoor. Participants made a forced choice between a deontological option (letting five people die) and a utilitarian option (sacrificing one person), while their response times were recorded.

After each scenario, participants estimated how physically close they felt to the victim using a visual distance scale. They also rated their emotional responses using standardized ratings, spanning negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger, sadness), moral emotions (e.g., guilt, shame, regret), and positive or neutral emotions. Importantly, emotions were assessed both for the option participants chose (factual emotions) and for the option they rejected (counterfactual emotions).

In Study 2, the researchers tested 46 additional participants to further isolate proximity. Here, the action remained constant across all scenarios (pulling a lever), while only the visual distance to the victim was manipulated. This design allowed the authors to examine whether perceived proximity alone, without changing the action, was sufficient to alter moral choices and emotional reactions.

Across both studies, participants reliably perceived the intended differences in physical distance, confirming that the proximity manipulations worked as designed. In Study 1, moral choices varied systematically with proximity. Participants were less willing to endorse the utilitarian option when the scenario required closer physical contact with the potential victim.

When harm felt more immediate and personal, participants tended to favor deontological choices, even when those choices resulted in worse overall outcomes. Scenarios implying greater distance, by contrast, were associated with a higher likelihood of sacrificing one person to save five.

Emotional responses mirrored these decision patterns. Negative emotions and moral emotions, including guilt, shame, regret, and disappointment, were strongest in high-proximity scenarios and weakest when the victim was farther away. Importantly, emotions associated with the unchosen alternative were consistently more intense than emotions linked to the chosen action.

This pattern suggests that participants anticipated the emotional consequences of both options and tended to choose the one expected to minimize emotional distress. Response times did not meaningfully differ across proximity levels, indicating that emotional intensity rather than deliberation time distinguished the scenarios.

Study 2 replicated and clarified these effects while holding the action constant. Even when participants always performed the same action, greater perceived distance increased utilitarian responding, whereas closer proximity reduced it. Emotional patterns showed a similar structure, with proximity amplifying negative and moral emotions and counterfactual emotions again exceeding factual ones.

Together, these findings show that physical closeness itself, not just the type of action, plays a central role in moral decision-making.

These findings are based on hypothetical, computer-based dilemmas, which may not fully capture how people behave in real-world moral situations involving genuine stakes and consequences.

The research, “The closer you are, the more it hurts: the impact of proximity on moral decision-making,” was authored by Federica Alfeo, Antonietta Curci, and Tiziana Lanciano.

Attachment anxiety shapes how people handle emotional conflict, and brief reminders of security or threat can shift that balance, according to research published in Cognition & Emotion.

Everyday life requires us to focus on what matters while ignoring emotionally distracting information; this is known as emotional conflict control. Previous research shows that people differ in how well they manage this kind of emotional interference, and attachment theory suggests that these differences may stem from how secure or insecure people feel in close relationships. Individuals with anxious attachment, for example, tend to be highly sensitive to emotional cues, whereas avoidantly attached individuals often suppress emotional information in favor of control.

Drawing on the functional neuro-anatomical model of attachment, Mengke Zhang and colleagues conducted two experiments to examine how attachment styles and short-term attachment “priming” experiences relate to emotional conflict control.

In Experiment 1, 225 Chinese undergraduate students completed the Experiences in Close Relationships questionnaire, which assesses two core dimensions of adult attachment, including attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Participants then completed an emotional face-word Stroop task that required them to identify whether a face displayed a happy or fearful expression while ignoring a word superimposed on the face.

These words varied in emotional valence and in whether they were related to close relationships, allowing the task to generate emotional conflict when facial expressions and words conveyed mismatched emotional information.

Performance on the Stroop task was used to index emotional interference, with slower or less accurate responses on emotionally incongruent trials indicating greater difficulty resolving conflict between emotional and task-relevant information.

The second experiment extended this approach by examining situational influences on emotional conflict control. A separate sample of 185 undergraduates first completed the same attachment questionnaire and baseline mood ratings, then completed a brief writing-based priming task. Participants were randomly assigned to recall either a supportive attachment-related experience (attachment security priming), a distressing attachment-related experience (attachment threat priming), or a neutral interpersonal memory.

Following the priming manipulation, participants reported their momentary sense of attachment security or insecurity as well as changes in positive and negative emotions. They also completed a modified version of the emotional face-word Stroop task using attachment-related words only. This design allowed the researchers to test whether temporary shifts in attachment-related feelings altered emotional conflict control beyond individuals’ baseline attachment styles.

Across both experiments, attachment anxiety consistently emerged as the most important individual difference shaping emotional conflict control.

In the first experiment, individuals higher in attachment anxiety showed greater emotional interference on the Stroop task, particularly when distracting words were positive in emotional tone. This pattern suggests that anxiously attached individuals were more likely to have their attention drawn toward emotionally salient information, making it harder to suppress distractions and focus on the task at hand.

Attachment avoidance, in contrast, was not reliably associated with reduced emotional interference, indicating that the emotional demands of the face-word Stroop task may overwhelm avoidant individuals’ typical tendency to disengage from emotional material.

The second experiment showed that attachment security priming successfully increased participants’ immediate sense of attachment security, but it did not lead to uniform improvements in emotional control. Instead, among individuals high in attachment anxiety, greater feelings of security were associated with increased emotional interference, suggesting that security cues may heighten emotional engagement rather than dampen it for those who are chronically sensitive to relationship concerns. For individuals lower in attachment anxiety, security priming had little effect on emotional interference.

Attachment threat priming produced a different pattern. Compared to the neutral condition, threat priming reduced emotional interference overall, indicating improved emotional conflict control. This effect was especially pronounced among individuals low in attachment anxiety, who showed clear reductions in interference following threat cues.

Among individuals high in attachment anxiety, threat priming worked indirectly; increased feelings of attachment insecurity were associated with reduced emotional interference, suggesting that threat cues may shift attention away from emotional evaluation and toward cognitive control in this group.

Of note is that the study relied on undergraduate samples and laboratory-based tasks, which may limit how well the findings generalize to other populations or to real-world emotional challenges.

The research “Attachment styles and attachment (in)security priming in relation to emotional conflict control,” was authored by Mengke Zhang, Song Li, Xinyi Liu, Qingting Tang, Qing Li, and Xu Chen.