Moral Sensitivity

Moral Sensitivity [MS] refers to the initially psychological components of logic before moral action, including the interaction between cognitive and emotion. Based on systematical reviews on theories and Empirical Researches on MS, this dissertation regards that MS, developing from individual moral life and experiences, is the prior reflection tendency to moral value and an ability to detect and explain moral problems. It is composed of two major parts: dispositional moral sensitivity and contextual moral sensitivity. Dispositional moral sensitivity [DMS] is the reflection disposition based on moral value priority, belonging to the static element of MS; contextual moral sensitivity [CMS], dynamic structural element of MS, refers to the psychological ability that individuals need to perceive the moral hints and problems and evaluate the context from the respect of moral thinking. This dissertation undertakes two parts empirical researches focused on the two elements and their relationships.The first part of the empirical research concentrates on the DMS and its relative problems, including four sub-studies. Study 1 analyses the structure of DMS and compile the questionnaires of DMS. Study 2 investigates the implicit theories on MS and probes the relationships between implicit theories on MS and DMS. Furthermore, study 3 probes the relationship between the implicit DMS and explicit DMS. Study 4, explores the relationship between moral perception to the immoral phenomena and individual DMS.The second part of the empirical research focuses on CMS and its relative problems, including three sub-studies. Study 5 analyses the nature of CMS from the respect of methodology and develop the CMS evaluation instrument based on unstructured problems. Study 6 probes the influences of characteristics of issue and its presented way on CMS. Finally, study 7 attempts to probe the concept priming and affective priming and their arousal impact.From the researches above, this dissertation comes to conclusions as follows:1. DMS is a morally psychological structure composed of moral theme, role involvement and MS intrinsic characteristics. Based on the conclusion the Dispositional Moral Sensitivity Questionnaires(DMSQ) contains five factors: guilt of empathy, punitivity, intrusiveness of empathy, frequency of perception, imagination with sympathy, which is in conformity with the requirements of psychometrics, and has satisfactory reliability and validity.2. The college students'implicit theories on MS can be described as four factors: positive characteristic, negative characteristic, introspective characteristic and extroversion characteristic, which tend to be positive. The study displays that there is a distinctive relation between college students'implicit theories on MS and their self-reported DMS respects.3. The study shows that there is not a clear relation between the implicit DMS and explicit DMS of the surveyed students. Compared with the attitude strength of moral, self-monitor can more effectively predict the disparities between college students'implicit DMS and explicit DMS.4. Both the external factors as the speed of stimulation, task etc, and the internal factor as DMS of individuals can directly affect their selective attention and recognization on moral problems; the effect of individual DMS on perceiving and recognizing moral issues is affected by such factors as time and task etc.5. The CMS evaluating system based on the unstructured context can be used to undertake qualitative evaluation and quantitative analysis, but not all of the indices meet the requirements of psychometrics. The evaluation system needs greater improvement.6. Both the characteristics of issue and the presented way of issue can affect the moral sensitivity on a degree. In this study, the proximity of the moral intensity has more significant effect on CMS than probability of effect. Whereas, moral issue- framing just superficially affects individuals'cognitive direction on unstructured issues.7. The moral concept has priming effect in a special unstructured story context, while cognitive styles play a role in arousing and selective bias through moral concept priming. In this research, the affective priming in the evoked context has no significant effect on CMS, but DMS and trait empathy as covariates have main effect on CMS.As the first psychological research on moral sensitivity in our country, this research makes a limited attempt to probe its structure, evaluating measures and mechanism of activation etc. In private, the author believes that the research can enrich the moral psychology system, do a great theoretical contribution to the promote study on moral socialization and it has a great practical significance in promoting the socialist moral construction, school moral practice and improving the enrichment and scientific process of personnel assessment.