Moral Judgment Research Of Non-clinical Adolescents With Depression

Moral judgment is an important social cognitive ability of human beings.It is an important guarantee for distinguishing between right and wrong and evaluating the good and evil.In recent years,the processing of moral judgment has attracted the attention of more and more researchers.They have tried to examine the psychological mechanism of moral judgment from the processing method.Recent studies have found that moral judgment is influenced by a variety of psychological functions related to cognition and emotion.It requires emotional arousal,psychological theory ability and inhibition control.These different social cognitive functions work together to complete the judgment of injury behavior.The normal functioning of these psychological functions is a prerequisite for us to make correct moral judgments.However,in the past,most of the research on morality was based on the conclusion that healthy individuals were the subjects,but there were few studies on individuals with psychological disorders.So can the conclusions based on healthy populations explain the moral judgments of people with mental disorders? Here,we use non-clinical teen depression as a sample to explore this issue.Adolescents formed a true self-discipline in this period,with a right and wrong self-evaluation.Depression is a psychological problem for adolescents.Adolescents with depression have emotional disorders and cognitive impairments,and they lack a variety of psychological functions required for moral judgment.Therefore,we discuss whether the moral judgment processing of depressed individuals is different from normal individuals,and the processing characteristics of such differences.This study uses a moral dilemma paradigm,a moral intention-outcome paradigm and Stroop paradigm to conduct moral judgments on adolescents with a tendency to depression: Experiment 1 examines the differences in moral judgment between depressed individuals and normal individuals in dilemmas.Experiment 2 examines the differences in intentional-resulted moral judgments between depressed individuals and normal individuals.Experiment 3 investigated the differences between depressed individuals and normal individuals on emotional Stroop tasks.The study obtained the following findings:(1)Depressed individuals are more inclined to make moral judgments than normal individuals,indicating that adolescents with depression are more dependent on emotional processing and.(2)Compared with normal individuals,depressed individuals are more tolerant of the moral judgment of the attempted injury(negative intention,neutral result)in the intention-resulting moral judgment,and the moral judgment of accidental injury(neutral intention,negative result)More rigorous,indicating that they are more concerned with emotionally oriented causal responsibility information(the result of behavior)when making moral judgments,while ignoring cognitive-oriented mental state information(the intention of the perpetrator).(3)The amount of Stroop effect of negative moral idioms in depressed individuals was significantly higher than that in positive moral idioms and neutral idioms,indicating that depressed individuals have obstacles to the suppression control of negative information.This study is the first to explore the characteristics of the process of moral judgment in non-clinical adolescents with depression,supplement the psychological ability required for moral judgment,and provide new ideas for the moral education of adolescents.