Moral emotions and the envisaging of mitigating circumstances for wrongdoing

Consenting to counter-normative sexual acts: Differential effects of consent on anger and disgust as a function of transgressor or consenter

“…Conversely, anger should be less focused on victims, or individuals who have been wronged, who generally evoke sympathy from third parties (see Goetz, Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010), and when there is mutual consent between individuals, the event should be less aggravating to third parties, since no injustice has occurred. This would be consistent with other research showing that anger is a flexible emotion, sensitive to the actors' reasons for acting and the circumstances surrounding an act of wrongdoing (Piazza, Russell, & Sousa, 2013;Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c.…”

“…In contrast with anger, disgust directed at a transgressor seems to be more stable regardless of the transgressor's reasons or justifications for acting (see Piazza et al, 2013;Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011a, 2011b, 2011cYoung & Saxe, 2011). For example, unlike anger, disgust appears insensitive to whether a counter-normative sexual act is performed with or without awareness (Young & Saxe, 2011) or in the pursuit of a greater good ).…”

“…We speculate that disgust is a more person-focused emotion than anger by virtue of the fact that inferences about an actor's motivations for desiring or performing a counter-normative sexual act are more focused on the inner qualities of a person (e.g., their desires and appetites), and less focused on the circumstances surrounding the event. By contrast, inferences about an actor's motives for causing injustice demand greater analysis of the surrounding circumstances, such as the recipient's attitude towards the act and whether there were mitigating factors (see Monroe, Guglielmo, & Malle, 2012;Piazza et al, 2013;Reeder, 2009).…”

“…We deliberately avoided the word "disgust", as research has shown that its linguistic meaning is closer to "anger" in situations theoretically more relevant to anger (e.g., unfairness; see Nabi, 2002;. Instead, we selected linguistic elements connoting the underlying physiology of disgust, pertaining to nausea and oral inhibition -terms which have been found to help dissociate disgust from anger in the past (see Horberg et al, 2009;Nabi, 2002;Piazza et al, 2013;Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011a, 2011b. Participants were also given a photo of an actor displaying a prototypical anger face, and a prototypical disgust face, taken from the University of California, Davis, Set of Emotion Expressions (Tracy, Robins, & Schriber, 2009).…”

Specks of Dirt and Tons of Pain: Dosage Distinguishes Impurity From Harm

“…First, moral judgments of purity violations-and the associated emotion of moral disgust-are generally unaffected by a wide range of potentially mitigating or aggravating factors (Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2013; see also Douglas, 1966). Because the insensitivity of moral disgust can be observed across a range of extenuating circumstances (Piazza, Russell, & Sousa, 2013;Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011), variation in outcomes may similarly fail to impact the harshness of purity judgments.…”