The Experiment Research Of Negative Emotion To The Influence Of Moral Judgment

The traditional moral judgment researches always emphasized the cognition factor and neglected the emotional factor. However, in recent decades, various evidences of behavior and cognitive neuroscience have indicated that the emotional factor are also playing a rather important role in moral judgment. The scientists have done a body of researches to discover the influence that caused by different emotional states. But those researches only focused on one certain emotion factor. What’s more, different researches applied different moral stories to study, and this would affect the comparability of the experiment results in different emotional states. In addition, rare researches have been done to make sure whether ordinary emotion and moral emotion would have the same effect to one same type of moral stories. And it is also not clear that whether these two types of emotion would increase or decrease the utilitarian judgment. So this study will try to resolve this problem through experiment research methods.In experiment one, the negative ordinary emotion of anger was applied. In experiment two and three, the negative moral emotion of disgust and guilty was applied respectively. Movie clips were used to trigger different emotion states in experiment one and two. In experiment three, written materials were used to trigger different emotion states. All experiments used3(emotional states:specific negative mood, neutral and control group)×2(moral judgment versions:personal judgment version, impersonal judgment version) two-factor mixed experiment design. The emotional states were serving as between-subjects factors, moral judgment version as within-subjects factors. The dependent variables were moral judgment points and reading time of two kinds moral judgment.Through the research we draw the following several conclusions:(1) In terms of types of personal moral judgment and impersonal judgment, anger, disgust and guilty mood have no effect on the impersonal judgment type, and guilty has no effect on the type of personal moral judgment. But the individuals under anger and disgust will give more utilitarian judgment in the personal moral judgment type.(2) Though disgust and anger made individuals give more utilitarian judgment, which means ordinary emotion and moral emotion will make individuals give more utilitarian judgment, the utilitarian judgment under the two kinds of emotion have no significant difference.