A new study has found that strokes could affect patients' moral compass, changing how they think about mistakes and people's intentions, The Daily Mail reported on Monday.
Scientists in Buenos Aires found that those who had a stroke in the frontal region of the brain were more likely to forgive, as long as no actual harm was done.
The study found the effect on moral judgment was similar to those patients diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
Stroke patients were more concerned with the outcome of a situation and focused less on what a person's intentions were.
Agustin Ibanez, of the Institute of Congitive Neurology in the Argentinian capital, and his team, said: "For both disorders, patients judged scenarios where the protagonists believed that they would cause harm but did not as being more permissible than the control group."
Altogether, "the performance of both groups is characterized by an over-reliance on outcome rather than by the integration of intentions and outcomes," everydayhealth.com reported.
Scientists compared eight patients who had suffered strokes in the frontal region of the brain, 19 patients believed to be suffering from frontotemporal dementia and an equal number of healthy, control patients.
None of the study participants had been diagnosed with any other neurological diseases, psychiatric disorders, or had suffered brain damage.
They were then presented with four different scenarios. The scenarios involved no intended or actual harm, accidental harm, unsuccessfully-attempted harm, and successfully-attempted harm.
Patients who had suffered a stroke or had FTD rated the scenario in which harm was intended, but not actually caused as more acceptable than the control group.
The patients with FTD also deemed accidental harm as less acceptable than the control group and stroke patients.
The results of this study suggest that the moral judgment abnormalities in both groups are related to an impaired integration of intentions and outcomes.
"Both patients with the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and patients with frontal strokes presented moral judgment abnormalities," Dr. Ibanez said.
