| Moral judgment is a comparatively complex evaluative psychological activity one frequently experience in daily life,which subjects to influences coming from a variety of factors in itself and the outside world.Nowadays,many studies have shown that emotions are an important factor that affect moral judgment.Moreover,as the rise of embodied-cognitive theory,it provides a brand new perspective for understanding and studying moral judgment.Moral judgment is embodied,while the physical movements and the surrounding environment will have an impact on moral judgment.Emotions are also embodied,but it seems that few people are concerned about whether the embodied emotion will also affect the moral judgment.According to the embodied emotional theory,facial expressions,body posture and other emotional-related physical movements will affect the individual’s emotional experience,perception,understanding and processing,in which the connection between facial expressions and emotional experience are especially valued by the researchers.Many studies have shown that making different facial expressions can produce different responses to emotional stimuli and activate their own different subjective emotional experiences.Facial expression,an individual’s basic response to the environment,is very common in people’s life.Facial expressions can not only be affected by the feelings of the mind,but also affect the inner emotional experience.Since emotions can affect moral judgments,then could the emotional expression of facial expressions affect the moral judgments? This is the primal problem that this study aims to explore.This study is conducted through two experiments.Experiment 1 Using Strack classic expression control paradigm to directly manipulate the facial expression of the subjects,the subjects will undertake the moral judgment task while keeping the facial expression.The purpose of this experiment is to explore whether the moral judgments could be affected by different facial expressions.The results showed that subjects whose facial expressions were manipulated to smiles was moretolerant about moral judgments than those manipulated to neutral expressions.Experiment 2 completes the same task as the experiment 1 in different thought frames,and explores whether facial expressions will have different effects on moral judgment under different thought frames.The results show that the moral judgment is only affected by expression manipulation under intuitive thought frame,but is not affected under reasoning thought frame.Finally,this study draws the following conclusions:(1)expression control affects the moral judgment;(2)emotional experience plays a mediating role between expression manipulation and moral judgment;(3)expression influence on moral judgment is only under the intuition thought frame,but is not affected under reasoning thought frame.The results of this study have further verified that the emotional analysis of facial feedback hypothesis and moral judgment of the double processing theory model. |
