The Influence Of Emotion Activation On College Students’ Moral Judgment

Moral judgment is an individual’s evaluation and judgment of the good or evil of a certain type of behavior.Early researchers mainly emphasized the role of rational cognition in moral judgment.Later,more and more scholars found that emotion is also an important factor affecting moral judgment.The subjects in this study were college students.The mood of the participants was aroused by video priming and story context priming,and then used general moral events,classic moral dilemmas,and adapted moral dilemmas as materials to investigate the influence of College Students’ emotion on moral judgment.This study consists of four experiments.In Experiment 1,common events in life were used as experimental materials to investigate the influence of video priming emotion on general moral problems.Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 used classic moral dilemma and adapted tram dilemma as experimental materials to investigate the influence of video priming emotion on moral dilemma.Based on the results of Experiment 3,Experiment 4 uses story situation as the material of emotional priming to study the influence of emotional priming on moral judgment of moral dilemma.The results show that:in general moral problems,college students’ moral judgment is affected by emotional valence,and they make more extreme moral judgment in the negative emotional state than in the positive one.Emotional arousal has no significant effect on moral judgment of general moral problems.Different from general moral problems,emotional valence and emotional arousal have no significant effect on moral judgment of moral dilemma.This may be because the corresponding parameters in the moral dilemma affect the severity of the event.Therefore,in the adapted ethical dilemma of tram problem,we set the number of people killed and saved(1-7 people),and found that when the number of people who can be saved is small,emotional arousal and emotional valence have a significant impact on moral judgment.Positive or high awake state is more inclined to make unethical judgments.On this basis,this study also found that the positive emotions triggered by the story situation can make individuals tend to make more moral judgmentsThe four results of this study show that the emotional state of the subjects will have an impact on moral judgment.In the wake-up mood state,the subjects will make more extreme moral judgment;the influence of the video activated emotion and the story situation activated emotion on the moral judgment of the dilemma is totally opposite.The research results enrich the research results of emotion and moral judgment,and further remind people to be calm and think twice when making moral judgment.