The Modulatory Role Of Attentional Control On The Effect Of Disgust To Moral Judgement

Cognitive reasoning and emotion impact are commonly considered as two majoraspects influencing moral judgment, but lately a large number of studies with unclearinternal mechanism are focusing on the influence of emotional effect on moral judgment.Recently, some researchers point out that attention system plays a modulatory role inthis effect, but the assume remains to be verified. This study adopts three experiments totest such a moderating effect of attentional control, all these experiments usebetween-subject design. In experiment1, neutral and disgust pictures are used to evokedifferent emotions of the participants whose individual differences of attentional controlare divided into high and low groups by the average score of color-word Stroop task aswell. As a result, participants in disgust tend to make more severe judgments than thosewho with neutral emotion, what’s more, in disgust condition, participants with lowattention control tend to make even much more severe judgments, but in the neutralemotions, there is no significant difference between the two groups of attentionalcontrol. In experiment2, disgust odor is used to evoke disgust emotion of allparticipants, and Attentional Control Scale (ACS) is used to measure their attentioncontrol. The results find that, participants with low attention control report strongeraversion and make more severe judgment, more importantly, attentional control can alsopredict effectively the result of moral judgement. In experiment3, participants’attentional control are manipulated by three additional tasks. After finishing the ACSand watching disgust video, some participants need to write down repeatedly theircurrent feeling on a paper (feel condition), and some participants need to stare at theblack screen (waiting condition), the remaining participants need to play the Tetrisgames (distraction condition). The results reveals that when the additional task asks fora further emotion processing of participants (feel condition), their averse emotion are strongest and judging results are the most severe, conversely, the participants report theweakest disgust and make the mildest judgments, remarkably, there are no significantdifferences between high and low attentional control in feel condition and distractioncondition, but not in waiting condition. This study uses three different ways to inducedisgust emotion and is based on Chinese students to confirm repeatedly the assumptionon attentional control, all the three experiments indicate that disgust can really makemoral judgments more severe, but individual difference of attentional control modulatesthis effect, that is, moral judgement is influenced by emotion system and attentionsystem.