The Influence Of Guilt And Empathy On Middle School Students’ Moral Judgments

Moral judgment refers to the process that people use the existing moral concepts and moral knowledges to judge and infer their own or others’ behaviors.In recent years,Haidt’s social intuitionist model of moral judgment,Greene’s dual-process model of moral judgment and some moral judgment studies have all proved that the emotional state of individuals plays an important role in the process of moral judgment.As a key period of their moral development,middle school students’ moral judgment has received much attention from many scholars.At present,researches on the impact of emotion types on moral judgment focus more on disgust and anger,while guilt as a type of moral emotion that helps people to conduct more ethical behaviors has been paid little attention but has not been consistent in conclusion.The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of guilt on middle school students’ moral judgment,and the role of moral dilemma types and individual trait empathy level in it.This study takes middle school students as subjects,draws lessons from the foreign related task situation paradigm to induce guilt as the experimental processing condition.The moral dilemma problems are used to measure the participants ’moral judgments and explore how guilt affects middle school students’ moral judgments.This study consists of two experiments:Experiment 1: to explore the influence of guilt on middle school students’ moral judgments in different types of moral dilemmas.Using a mixed design of 2(emotional state: guilt group,control group)×2(moral dilemma type: personal moral dilemma,impersonal moral dilemma).Through repeated measurement analysis of variance,the results show that,in personal moral dilemmas,compared with the control group,the participants in the guilt group are more inclined to make deontological judgments,while there is no significant difference between the two groups in the impersonal moral dilemmas.Experiment 2: Based on the results of experiment 1,explore the influence of guilt and empathy on middle school students’ moral judgments in personal moral dilemmas.Using a between-subject design of 2(emotional state: guilt group,controlgroup)× 2(trait empathy level: high,low).Through multivariate analysis of variance,the results showed that,in personal moral dilemmas,compared with the control group,the participants with high empathy are more likely to make deontological judgments,while there is no significant difference between the two groups with low empathy.Combining the results of the two experiments,the conclusions are as follows:1.The influence of guilt on moral judgment is regulated by the types of moral dilemma.In the face of personal moral dilemmas,middle school students are more inclined to make deontological judgments in the state of guilt than in the state of neutral emotions,while there is no significant difference in the moral judgments in the two emotional states when facing impersonal moral dilemmas.2.The influence of guilt on moral judgment is regulated by the level of individual trait empathy.In the face of personal moral dilemmas,middle school students with high empathy are more inclined to make deontological judgments in the state of guilt than in the state of neutral emotions,while middle school students with low empathy have no significant differences in moral judgments under the two emotional states.