The Influence Of Emotional Valence And Affective Closeness On Undergraduates’ Moral Judgment

College stage is a significant period for the ideological and moral construction of college students,as well as the key period for the formation of good moral concepts and the cultivation of moral judgment.The Social Intuitionist Model asserts that the moral judgment of an individual is not only rational,but also irrational,and that the irrational emotional factors may be the psychological elements of deeper or more primitive moral judgment,which is a rapid and unconscious intuitive response driven by emotion.Since then,researchers began to attach more significance to the emotional factors in moral judgment,and triggered a large number of behavioral studies and brain imaging studies related to this.However,in recent years,the theory of explanatory level has provided a new perspective for the deep mechanism of moral judgments.In addition to the emotions generated by individuals themselves,the degree of emotional connection between individuals may also affect the results of moral judgments.When the emotional intimacy between the individual and the object of moral behavior is weak,the individual’s moral judgment ability is lower,that is,the correct rate of judgment is lower.In order to understand the psychological mechanism of moral judgment clearly,it is necessary to explore the time processing characteristics of moral judgment.In this study,we collect and compile the daily behaviors of college students as the experimental corpus material and evaluate the moral events in the daily behavior of these university students.At the same time,the subthreshold priming paradigm is adopted and the ERP technology is used to try to study and explore the time-history processing mechanism of moral judgments from the implicit dimension.The target of our two experiments was to investigate the effects of emotional valence and emotional closeness on college students’ moral judgments.This paper includes two studies:In Experiment One,the purpose of experiment examined the effects of emotional valence and emotional intimacy on college students’ daily moral judgments from thebehavioral level.Subthreshold priming paradigm was used to explore the effects of three different emotional valences and two kinds of emotional closeness on college students’ daily moral behavior judgments and their interaction.The results show that,(1)The significant interaction between emotion valence and behavior category shows,compared with neutral emotions,the correct judgment rate of moral behavior in positive and negative emotions is lower than that of unethical behavior.(2)The interaction between emotional valence and emotional intimacy was significant.Compared with neutral emotions,the accuracy of college students’ judgment of acquaintances in positive and negative emotions is lower than that of strangers,and the difference is more significant in positive emotions.Therefore,in order to further study the processing mechanism of moral judgment under positive emotions,Experiment Two examined the effects of behavioral objects with different emotional closeness on moral judgment of college students under positive and neutral emotions during subthreshold priming from the electrophysiological level.In Experiment Two,the results showed that(1)in terms of accuracy index,the accuracy of acquaintances was significantly lower in the positive emotion than that of strangers,while the accuracy of acquaintances and strangers was not significant in the neutral emotion.(2)Under positive emotions,the amplitude of N400 and LPP induced by college students’ behavioral moral judgments about acquaintances rather than strangers is larger.However,we didn’t see the discrepancy in the amplitude of N400 and LPP induced by the moral judgments of acquaintances and strangers in neutral emotions.To sum up,this study around the angle of "emotion",from the behavior of moral judgment and electrophysiological reaction on indicators show that college students’ individual emotions and emotional intimacy,in unconscious state will affect daily life behavior of moral judgment,which provides some academic basis and empirical support for moral education and training of the college students.