Horror, fear, and moral disgust are differentially elicited by different types of harm.

Abstract

Witnessing or experiencing extreme and incomprehensible harm elicits an intense emotional response that is often called "horror." Although traditional emotion taxonomies have categorized horror as a subtype of fear and/or disgust, recent empirical work has indicated that horror is a distinct emotion category (Cowen & Keltner, 2017). However, exactly how horror is different from fear and disgust has remained unclear. The current studies represent the first empirical attempt to clarify how horror is distinct from fear and moral disgust. Results indicated that these emotions are elicited by different aspects of harm: horror is a response to the severity or abnormality of harm, fear to the self-relevance of harm, and moral disgust to the harm's causal agent. In a survey of personal experiences of emotions (Study 1), participants reported having felt horror in response to the actual occurrence of extreme or abnormal harm, but felt fear and moral disgust in response to events involving no harm or only mild harm. Participants also reported greater cognitive disruption (e.g., disbelief, schema-incongruence) during horror than during fear or moral disgust. Experiments testing the effects of different aspects of harm on emotion ratings indicated that horror was differentially increased by harm that was abnormal (vs. common) and had already occurred (vs. potential threat), whereas fear was differentially increased by harm that had high (vs. low) self-relevance (Study 2). Further, extreme (vs. mild) harm differentially increased horror, but the presence (vs. absence) of a blameworthy agent differentially increased moral disgust (Study 3). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).