Emotion And Moral Judgment:The Sepertate Function Of Emotion Under Dual-Process-Model

Emotion as an important variable plays an important role on moral judgment. In recent years, In the field of emotion and moral judgment, most researchers focus on the study of emotion’s influence on individual moral acceptable degree, on the relationship between emotion and decision-making of utilitarianism, and on exploring the disgust, anger, and other specific emotional’impact on individual moral judgment. While has less research in different processing system of emotion (inference processing system and intuitive processing system). Greene et al. found that emotion as a kind of information can influence moral judgment through two sub-systems.Also other researchers consider that, the role emotion plays in two sub-systems was different. In intuition system it is direct and fast,while in reasoning system it is indirect and processing slowly.This study attempts to explore the relationship between emotion and moral judgment in different processing subsystem by using time pressure paradigm in dual processing sub-system. Namely, in intuitive processing subsystem, the emotion is directly influence moral judgment in an unconscious way; while in reasoning sub-system, the role of emotion in moral judgment is mediated by cognitive resources. Only when the cognitive resources are in a lack of state,can emotion significantly influence on moral judgment. That is to say,in the reasoning subsystem, emotional effect on moral judgment will be mediated by the regulation of cognitive resources. Our study designed three experiments for this study:Experiment 1 using between subjects single factor design,the independent variable have three levels:positive emotion, negative emotion and neutral emotion. Dependent variable is the acceptance for moral judgment. Results show that, positive emotion group’s judgment scores were significantly higher than the neutral and negative conditions. While negative emotions group’s judgment scores is significantly below than positive and neutral group.Experiment 2 using 2 (emotion:positive vs. negative)* 2 (dual-processing system:intuition vs reasoning) between the subjects design. Results show that in intuition condition, positive emotion is more significantly acceptable than negative group. While in reasoning condition, positive emotion group and negative emotion group is not different significantly.Experiment 3 using 2 (emotion:positive vs. negative)* 2 (self loss:loss vs. no loss) between subjects design.Results are as follow:in the loss condition, emotion has significant effect on moral judgment, shown as:positive emotions group judgment scores is significantly higher than negative emotion group; But in the condition of no loss, the effect of emotion on moral judgment was not significant, shown as:positive emotion and negative emotion group’s acceptable degree of judgment was not different significantly.Through the experiments we get the following conclusions:(1) emotional effect on moral judgment in different processing system are not the same.(2) in the intuitive processing system, the influence of emotion are directly, unconsciously,and uncontrollable.(3)while in the reasoning processing system, the emotion will be affected by the capacity of cognitive resources.