Moral Emotions: An Explorative Study on Elementary School Teachers of Yogyakarta

Abstract

Moral emotions are subset of basic emotions and linked to the interests or welfare either of society as a whole or at least of persons other than the judge or agent. These are emotions that respond to moral transgression, or that motivate individuals to choose a certain moral behavior. To encourage children to be considerate and compassion to others, elementary school educators are expected to understand the essential values of adequate moral emotions. Having moral emotions eventually will motivate teachers and students to do good deed. This study is an exploratory qualitative study attempting to build an understanding on the Indonesian school teacher’s concepts of moral emotions and their antecedents with an indigenous approach. An open ended survey was conducted to a sample of 121 elementary school teachers from Yogyakarta. The result of this research revealed the perspective of elementary school teachers on moral emotions and the main antecedents of the teachers’ moral emotions. This study will be the groundwork of aexperimental research with main objective to study the effect of moral emotions to ethical decision making. Theoretical and applied implementation of this research results also will be discussed.