Relevance of Emotions in Morality (2013)

Undergraduates: Joseph Heffner, Daryl Cameron

Faculty Advisor: Keith Payne
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Many studies have found that changing people¿s emotions will change their moral judgments. We examined whether people who can skillfully differentiate between emotional states recognize and disregard irrelevant emotions and pay more attention to relevant emotions. In our experiment we did not find that individual variations in emotional differentiation moderated the relationship between disgust and subsequent moral judgments. Further examination of the data revealed consistency effects where participants used past moral judgments to inform future moral judgments. Due to the novel nature of the experiment, the small stimuli set limited the number of target behaviors participants rated. Future studies plan to expand the set to avoid such consistency effect.
Keywords: morality, emotion differentiation, intuitionist, affect misattribution, disgust