Do community and autonomy moral violations elicit different emotions?

Abstract

According to one important set of theories, different domains of immorality are linked to different discrete emotions-panculturally. Violations against the community elicit contempt, whereas violations against an individual elicit anger. To test this theory, American, Indian and Japanese participants (N = 480) indicated contempt and anger reactions (with verbal rating and face selection) to both the types of immorality. To remedy method problems in previous research, community and autonomy violations were created for the same story-frame, by varying the target to be either the community or an individual. Community and autonomy violations did not differ significantly in the emotion elicited: overall, both types of violations elicited more anger than contempt (and more negative emotion of any kind than positive emotion). By verbal rating, Americans and Indians reported more anger than contempt for both types of violation, whereas Japanese reported more contempt than anger for both types. By face selection, the three cultural groups selected anger more than contempt for both types of violation. The results speak against defining distinct domains of morality by their association with distinct emotions.

Is purity a distinct and homogeneous domain in moral psychology?

“…Future studies including more diverse cultural samples might be revealing (Barrett et al, 2016). In other research, we have begun to explore this question (Kollareth et al, 2019). Of course, Americans were the participants in most studies claiming a single purity moral domain.…”

Moral expressions in Hong Kong, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom: Cultural similarities and differences in how affective facial muscle activity predicts judgments.

“…Moreover, we did not ask if the participants personally interpreted each scenario as originally intended according to its foundation category (e.g., as primarily wrong because of being harmful, etc. ), which could also vary across cultures (e.g., Kollareth, Kikutani, Shirai, & Russell, 2019; Kollareth & Russell, 2017).…”

Justifications of emotional responses to eliciting situations: A narratological approach to the CAD hypothesis

“…Firstly, the correspondences between the three moral emotions and the three moral codes are not neatly aligned as claimed. For example, the emotion of anger was frequently reported in situations involving the moral violations both in the domain of autonomy and in the domain of community ( Russell et al, 2013 ; Kollareth and Russell, 2017 ; Kollareth et al, 2019 ), and the emotion of disgust failed to be recorded as a response to any type of moral violation ( Piazza and Landy, 2020 ). Secondly, some parameters abstracted from different types of moral violations, rather than the categorical moral violations themselves, were found to provide a better account of the elicitation of different emotional responses.…”

“…In Rozin et al (1999) , moral judgment of the situations was made in the classification task and was not treated as an independent variable. Moral judgment received more attention in Kollareth and Russell (2017) and Kollareth et al (2019) , which instructed study participants to rate the immorality of the behavior of the perpetrator in the eliciting situation using a 7-point Likert scale. More significantly, moral judgment was treated as a key variable in the investigation of judgment-emotion correlations in Giner-Sorolla and Chapman (2017) , Molho et al (2017) , and Piazza and Landy (2020) .…”