Understanding these mechanisms may be informative to how economical habits and moral behaviors are shaped. Nevertheless, much of greed research has been at the behavioral level and its associated cognitive and neural mechanisms remain understudied. subprime mortgage crisis in the United States and debt crisis in Europe) ( Mussel et al., 2015) but have also acknowledged its influence in motivating innovation and spurring economic growth ( Williams, 2000 Fehr and Gintis, 2007), implying the duality of greed. Economists have highlighted greed’s destructive role in financial crises (e.g. However, greed is not inherently negative. In particular, greed has been broadly believed to correlate positively with maximization tendencies ( Seuntjens et al., 2015a), materialism ( Krekels and Pandelaere, 2015), egoism ( Krekels and Pandelaere, 2015) and selfishness ( Lambie and Haugen, 2019). Greed is not only associated with immorality and unethical behavior in philosophy and religion ( Seuntjens et al., 2015a, 2019), but has also been considered to be a cause of many financial problems and scandals ( Seuntjens et al., 2016, 2019). Greed personality trait (GPT) is often characterized by the experience of desiring more and the dissatisfaction of not having enough. Greed personality trait, happiness, negative psychopathology, aggression, voxel-based morphometry Introduction These findings provide novel insights into the negative characteristics of dispositional greed, and suggest their mediating roles on greedy individuals’ aggression and underlying neuroanatomical substrates. Voxel-based morphometry analysis also revealed that gray matter volumes (GMVs) in the prefrontal-parietal-occipital system were associated with negative psychopathology and happiness, and GMVs in the frontal pole and middle frontal cortex mediated the relationships between GPT and aggressions. Importantly, these findings were replicated in an independent sample ( n = 68). Negative psychopathology and happiness remained robust mediators. Moreover, exploratory factor analysis extracted factor scores across three factors (negative psychopathology, happiness, and motivation) from the measures scales.
Mediation analyses further demonstrated that negative symptoms and psychological well-being mediated greedy individuals’ aggression. depression, loss of interest, negative affect), lower psychological well-being and more aggression. Correlational analyses revealed that greedy individuals show more negative symptoms (e.g.
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To describe its emotion-related features, we utilized a series of scales to measure corresponding emotion/affect and aggression ( n = 411) and collected their neuroimaging data ( n = 330) to explore underlying morphological substrates. Greed personality trait (GPT), characterized by the desire to acquire more and the dissatisfaction of never having enough, has been hypothesized to link with negative emotion/affect characteristics and aggressive behaviors.