Folk beliefs about the relationships anger and disgust have with moral disapproval

Evidence for a dissociation between moral reasoning and moral decision-making in Tourette syndrome

Despite the growing interest on how Tourette syndrome (TS) affects social cognition skills, this field remains to date relatively under-explored. Here, we aim to advance knowledge on the topic by studying moral decision-making and moral reasoning in a group of adolescents with TS and a group of healthy controls. Overall, we found higher endorsement (i.e. a greater 'yes' response rate) for utilitarian solutions of incidental and instrumental moral dilemmas in TS compared to controls. By contrast, we reported an overall higher tendency of TS individuals to apply principles described in the moral foundation questionnaire to establish whether something is morally right or wrong. Our results document intact moral reasoning in TS and suggest that a deficit in suppressing inappropriate behaviours and/or altered sense of agency might be responsible for their higher utilitarian moral decision-making.

Minimal criteria for an impurity domain of morality

There is much disagreement about the claim that impurity constitutes a moral domain. We propose a set of minimal criteria that could help re-orient the field to a direction of consensus in the assessment of this claim. We illustrate how the criteria apply to aspects of the current literature.

Expressions of moral disgust reflect both disgust and anger

ABSTRACTPeople often appear to conflate anger and disgust, seemingly using expressions of both emotions interchangeably in response to moral violations. Yet, anger and moral disgust differ in their antecedents and consequences. These empirical observations are associated with two broad theoretical perspectives: one describes expressions of moral disgust as metaphors for anger, whereas the other describes moral disgust as functionally distinct from anger. Both accounts have received empirical support from separate and seemingly inconsistent literatures. The present study seeks to resolve this inconsistency by focusing on the different ways moral emotions have been measured. We formalise three theoretical models of moral emotions: one in which expressions of disgust are purely associated with anger (but not physiological disgust), one in which disgust and anger are fully separated and have distinct functions, and an integrative model that accommodates both metaphorical use in language and distinctive function. We test these models on responses to moral violations (four studies; N = 1608). Our results suggest that moral disgust has distinct functions, but that expressions of moral disgust are sometimes used to convey moralistic anger. These findings have implications for the theoretical status and measurement of moral emotions.

Disgusting Democrats and Repulsive Republicans: Members of Political Outgroups Are Considered Physically Gross

The status of disgust as a sociomoral emotion is debated. We conducted a stringent test of whether social stimuli (specifically, political outgroup members) can elicit physical disgust, as distinct from moral or metaphorical disgust. We employed stimuli (male faces) matched on baseline disgustingness, provided other ways for participants to express negativity toward outgroup members, and used concrete self-report measures of disgust, as well as a nonverbal measure (participants' facial expressions). Across three preregistered studies (total N = 915), we found that political outgroup members are judged to be "disgusting," although this effect is generally weaker for concrete self-report measures and absent for the nonverbal measure. This suggests that social stimuli are capable of eliciting genuine physical disgust, although it is not always outwardly expressed, and the strength of this result depends on the measures employed. We discuss implications of these results for research on sociomoral emotions and American politics.

Defensive emotions and evaluative judgements: Sensitivity to anger and fear predicts moral judgements, whereas sensitivity to disgust predicts aesthetic judgements

Aesthetic and moral evaluations engage appetitive and defensive emotions. While the role played by pleasure in positive aesthetic and moral judgements has been extensively researched, little is known about how defensive emotions influence negative aesthetic and moral judgements. Specifically, it is unknown which defensive emotions such judgements tap into, and whether both kinds of judgement share a common emotional root. Here, we investigated how participants' individual sensitivity to disgust, fear, anger and sadness predicted subjective judgements of aesthetic and moral stimuli. Bayesian modelling revealed that participants who were more sensitive to anger and fear found conventional and moral transgressions more wrong. In contrast, participants who were more sensitive to disgust disliked asymmetrical geometric patterns and untidy rooms more. These findings suggest that aesthetic and moral evaluations engage multiple defensive emotions, not just disgust, and that they may rely on different defensive emotions as part of their computational mechanism.

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

The CAD hypothesis holds that there is mapping between the three moral emotions (contempt, anger and disgust) and the three moral codes of community, autonomy and divinity. Different from previous designs to establish correlations between emotions and eliciting situations which instantiate moral codes, this paper takes a narratological approach to the CAD hypothesis by examining the relationships between the three moral emotions and moral judgment relating to the three moral codes in the context of eliciting situations. First, similarity data pertaining to eliciting situations were collected by using the Order k/n-1 with fixed K method. Second, the participants were instructed to write down both their responses and justifications of their responses to the eliciting situations. A narratological analysis of the justifications of responses show that they vary along three variables: narrator, character, and basis (mostly in the form of moral judgment). The descriptive statistics of participants' responses and of their justifications show that more than a half of responses are in the categories of anger (24.8%), disgust (20.7), and contempt (7.7%) and that about 60% of justifications contain a component of moral judgment based on the three moral codes of autonomy (30.03%), divinity (18.1), and community (11.82%). Correspondence analyses among eliciting situations, emotional responses and the three variables of justifications, together with results from the Multidimensional Scaling analysis of the similarity data, show that the CAD hypothesis is largely supported if mappings are set between the emotions in question and moral judgment concerning the eliciting situations (the basis variable of justification) and that the hypothesis is conditioned by the variable of character.