Abstract
Emotion plays an important role in moral judgment, and people always use emotion regulation strategies to modulate emotion, consciously or unconsciously. Previous studies had investigated only the relationship between emotion regulation strategies and moral judgment in the Harm domain, and revealed divergent results. Based on Moral Foundations Theory, the present study extended the investigation into moral judgment in all five moral domains and used a set of standardized moral vignettes. Two hundred and six college students filled in the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and completed emotional ratings and moral judgment on moral vignettes from Moral Foundations Vignettes. Correlation analysis indicated that habitual cognitive reappraisal was negatively related to immorality rating in Harm, Fairness, and Loyalty domains. Regression analysis revealed that after controlling the effect of other variables, cognitive reappraisal negatively predicted immorality ratings in the Harm and Fairness domains. Further mediation analysis showed that emotional valence only partially explained the association between cognitive reappraisal and moral judgment in Harm area. Some other factors beyond emotional valence were suggested for future studies.
Highlights
Moral judgment involves assessing the moral acceptability of an action or other characteristics (Avramova and Inbar, 2013; Szekely and Miu, 2015a)
Moral judgment in certain domain was simultaneously regressed on age, gender, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, emotional valence, and emotional arousal
As can be seen from the Table, after controlling the effects of other variables, emotional valence negatively and emotional arousal positively predicted immorality ratings in all Emotion plays an important role in moral judgment, and people always use emotion regulation strategies to modulate emotion, consciously or unconsciously
Summary
Moral judgment involves assessing the moral acceptability of an action or other characteristics (Avramova and Inbar, 2013; Szekely and Miu, 2015a). Recent studies further revealed that the effect of emotion in moral judgment differed when emotion varied in valence and intensity (Carmona-Perera et al, 2013; Pastötter et al, 2013). Szekely and Miu (2015b) directly examined the relationship among cognitive reappraisal, emotional arousal, and moral choices. We adopted some standardized moral vignettes from Moral Foundations Vignettes and extended the investigation of the association between two habitually used emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal and suppression) and moral judgment to all the five moral domains. We speculated that in general, cognitive reappraisal would predict immorality rating better than expressive suppression due to their effectiveness in regulating negative emotions. We could not generate domain-specific hypotheses due to limited literature
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