CAD Revisited

Abstract

The CAD model posits a mapping of contempt, anger, and disgust onto the moral codes of community, autonomy, and divinity, respectively. A recent study by Hutcherson and Gross posited moral disgust as the dominant other-condemning emotion across all three moral codes. However, the methodology used may have incidentally increased the relevance of disgust. In the current experiment, one condition repeated Hutcherson and Gross's procedure, while in another condition, the authors added the word moral to three other emotions. Consistent with CAD, anger had the highest intensity ratings in response to autonomy violations, whereas ''grossed out'' was the dominant response to divinity violations. Furthermore, the adjective ''moral'' increased the relevance of anger, contempt, and fear in irrelevant domains, which suggests that the adjective moral increases any emotion's moral relevance.

Moral emotions and the envisaging of mitigating circumstances for wrongdoing

“…Many studies have connected disgust to moral judgment (e.g., Inbar et al, 2009;Rozin et al, 1999;Schnall et al, 2008;Wheatley & Haidt, 2005). Still, the relationship between disgust and moral judgment is far from clear (see Haidt, 2001;Huebner, Dwyer, & Hauser, 2008;Hutcherson & Gross, 2011;Pizarro, Inbar, & Helion, 2011;Prinz, 2007;Russell et al, 2012). As we have seen in the present research, anger seems to be more tightly connected to moral judgment, and the factors affecting moral judgment, than is disgust.…”

“…One potential source of covariance involves the metaphorical use of disgust language by lay people to express anger for transgressions theoretically irrelevant to disgust (e.g., lying, cheating, unfairness, breaking promises; see Nabi, 2002;Russell, Piazza, & Giner-Sorolla, 2012). Because of this issue, in the present studies we utilized regression analyses to control for shared variance between anger and disgust.…”

How Emotional Frames Moralize and Polarize Political Attitudes

“…Supporting this view, individuals who are more dispositionally sensitive to disgust tend to make harsher moral judgments in a wide variety of domains (Chapman & Anderson, 2014;Jones & Fitness, 2008), though this effect may be particularly strong for purity issues that are thematically related to disgust (Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009;Wagemans, Brandt, & Zeelenberg, 2017). Feelings of integral disgust are also strongly associated with moral judgments, particularly purity violations (Horberg et al, 2009;Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999;Russell, Piazza, & Giner-Sorolla, 2012).…”

Disgust and Anger Relate to Different Aggressive Responses to Moral Violations

“…In this study, participants’ emotional responses to moral violations were measured, and the target of the violations (self vs. other) was manipulated, with the assumption that violations targeting the self are more personally costly than those targeting another person (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011). However, this study was limited by methods that confounded emotional experience with moral relevance (i.e., participants were asked the degree to which they experienced “moral disgust” and “anger”—but not “moral anger”; Russell et al, 2013). In the current studies, we aimed to more rigorously test whether anger and disgust, rather than reflecting equivalent responses to moral violations, depend on the self-relevance of those violations.…”