A Study Of The Effects Of Alexithymia And Emotional Types On Moral Decision Making

Alexithymia was first proposed by Sifneos in the 1970 s.Individuals with alexithymia lack the ability to describe their emotional experience,express their emotions correctly,and lack the characteristics of fantasy and practical thinking.However,it is not a disease,but a stable personality trait,but a complication caused by the disease.The study found that about 10% of normal people are not good at expressing their emotional experience and describing their emotional feelings in language.Moral decision-making represents a person's moral response,assessment or inference to the results of his actions in real or imaginary situations.According to Green's dual-processing model,moral decision-making can be divided into intuitive moral decision-making based on emotional factors and utilitarian moral decision-making based on cognitive resources.At present,focusing on investment management,gambling and risk taking,and executive function is the key point for researchers to explore alexithymia and decision-making.The impact of moral decision-making on the daily livelihood of individuals with alexithymia is rarely mentioned.Because it is difficult for alexithymia people to experience negative emotions,this study explores whether alexithymia can affect individual moral decision-making through experiments.At the same time,combined with practical investigation,under the conditions of positive and negative emotions,there are differences in the choice of moral decision-making among individuals with different alexithymia.This study consists of a preliminary experiment and two formal experiments.Pre-experiment,the validity test of emotional induction effect;Experiment 1,examining the influence of alexithymia on moral decision-making,adopts a mixed experiment of 2(alexithymia: high/low)*2(moral dilemma: personal dilemma/non-personal dilemma),alexithymia as inter-subject variable,moral dilemma as in-subject variable,tendency in moral decision-making as dependent variable.In experiment 2,the effects of alexithymia and emotional types on moral decision-making were studied by using a mixed experiment of 2(alexithymia: high/low)*2(emotional type: positive/negative)*2(moral dilemma: personal dilemma/non-personal dilemma).The alexithymia and emotional types were inter-group variables,moral dilemma was intra-group variable,and the tendency in moral decision-making was dependent variable.The experimental results show that:(1)Active and negative emotional trigger materials are effective?(2)There was no significant gender difference in alexithymia and moral decision-making.(3)The main effect of moral dilemma is significant,that is,compared with personal dilemma,individuals tend to make utilitarian decisions when choosing non-personal dilemma.(4)The main effect of alexithymia is significant,that is,compared with low alexithymia individuals,high alexithymia individuals tend to make utilitarian decisions.(5)The interaction between alexithymia and moral decision-making,i.e.in personal predicament,individuals with high alexithymia tend to make utilitarian decisions,while individuals with low alexithymia tend to make moral decisions,but there is no significant difference in non-personal predicament.(6)The interaction between emotional types and alexithymia is significant.In positive emotional state,individuals with low alexithymia are more likely to make utilitarian decisions than those with high alexithymia.However,there was no significant difference in the negative emotional state.(7)The third-order interaction of emotional type,alexithymia and moral dilemma is significant,that is,in the positive and negative emotional state of personal dilemma,the utilitarian choice between individuals with high alexithymia and individuals with low alexithymia is significantly different.In the positive and negative emotional state of non-personal predicament,the degree of alexithymia has no significant difference on moral decision-making.