The Effect Of Emotion And Emotion Regulation On College Students’ Moral Judgment

Moral judgment is an eternal field in moral psychology research. Although the study of traditional moral judgments considered cognitive plays an important role or even the only role in moral judgments. However, in recent years more and more moral psychologists advocate that the role of emotion in moral judgment cannot be ignored. Haidt et al believed that morality was composed by five different areas which were harm/care, reciprocity/fairness, within the group, class/authority and sanctity/purity. Each area had evolutionary roots, corresponding contexts and corresponding emotions. For example, the area of harm/care corresponded sympathy and antipathy, the area of reciprocity/fairness corresponded anger, and guilt and other emotions, the area of sanctity/purity corresponded disgust and other emotions.This study targeted to college students whose right and wrong sense and the value were in the preliminary mature stage, and conducted two experiments. The first experiment was tested using movie clips to trigger anger and disgust emotions in order to contrast the effect of the two emotions to college students’ moral judgment on harm/care, reciprocity/fairness and sanctity/purity three moral areas. The second experiment was on the basis of the first experiment, triggering subjects’anger anddisgust emotions. And simultaneously used instructions to control subjects to use emotion regulation way of the evaluation ignore or the expression suppress, and further explored the effect of emotion regulation to college students’ moral judgment on three moral areas. The results show that:(1) The motion of anger affected moral judgment on the area of harm/care area; the motion of anger did not affect moral judgment on the area of reciprocity/fairness and the motion of disgust affected moral judgment on the area of sanctity/purity.(2) The emotion regulation way of the expression suppresses significantly increased anger and disgust emotions; the emotion regulation way of the evaluation ignores significantly reduced anger and disgust emotions.(3) Subjects who used the emotion regulation way of expression suppress to regulate anger were more tolerant to determine moral virtues and more harsh to determine moral breachs on the moral area of harm/care than subjects who used the emotion regulation way of evaluation ignore to regulate anger; subjects who used the emotion regulation way of expression suppress to regulate disgust were more tolerant to determine moral virtues and more harsh to determine moral breachs on the moral area of sanctity/purity than subjects who used the emotion regulation way of evaluation ignore to regulate disgust. Subjects who used the the way of expression suppress or the way of evaluation ignore to regulate anger or disgust, had no significant differences anout determining moral behaviors on the reciprocity/fairness moral area.