Moral Emotions

Emotions that respond to moral violations/ motivate moral behavior

  • important for upholding cooperation
  • self-conscious/ self-evaluative emotions since they are evoked by individual's understanding and evaluation of the self
  • require higher degree of cognitive infusion

Guilt



functions:

  • appeasement function = show that transgressor is also "suffering" > evoke sympathy, forgiveness, reduces punishment
  • signal that transgressor is aware of and committed to the norms of the group

a feeling of regret over wrongdoing, involves accepting responsibility for/ association with transgression

  • agitation-based emotion
  • aroused when actor actually cause, anticipates causing, is associated with aversive event

Collective responsibility:
accepting responsibility and seek to compensate for negative actions of ingroup members

  • young children accept responsibility for ingroup members

Research 1: Choosing your informant: weighing familiarity and recent accuracy (Corriveau and Harris, 2009)

  • Whether preschool children trust a familiar rather than an unfamiliar informant whether that preference is altered if the familiar informant proves accurate or inaccurate

Procedure:
A “transgressor” accidentally harmed a “victim” i.e. by destroying the victim’s toys

  • use facial expressions to express guilt
  • use explicit apologies to express guilt

Results:

  • age 4 and 5 = sensitive to appeasement function of guilt displays


  • by age 4 = grasp appeasement functions of explicit apologies, but NOT the guilt and remorse presented by apologies

Research 2: Harm vs. No Harm x Self vs. Others

Results:

  • by age 3 = children make amends for transgressions by attempting to repair and verbally express guilt


  • guilt motivates reparative and prosocial behaviour

Shame

Unpleasant emotional reaction to an actual/ presumed negative judgement of self by others

  • Dejection-based emotion, passive, helpless
  • aroused by self-related aversive events

Difference between shame & guilt

GUILT:

  • focus is on action
  • desire to undo aspects of behaviour
  • leads to reparative action (confess, apologise, undo)
  • proneness to guilt is correlated with perspective-taking and empathic concern

SHAME:

  • focus is on self
  • desire to undo aspects of self
  • more intense and painful
  • leads to attempts to hide, deny, escape
  • proneness to shame is correlated with impaired capacity for "other-oriented" empathy & problematic, "self-oriented" personal distress responses

Pride

feelings of competence/ efficacy

  • must appraise the source of pride as contingent upon own characteristics

Moral Emotion Attributions

emotions that children and adolescents attribute to an actor as a consequence of a morally relevant action

Happy Victimizer phenomenon
discrepancy between young children's understanding of moral rules and their attribution of positive emotions to wrong-doers


  • understand that acts of victimization are wrong, but still attribute positive emotions to those who intentionally cause harm

Experimental paradigm:
• engage children in 1-on-1 interview procedure where they listen to a short story involving a prototypical moral violation (e.g. physical harm – pushing a peer to the ground) between the victim and victimizer.
• Standard emotion attribution question is asked (e.g. “how does the victimizer feel?”)

young children consistently indicated that the victimizer is happy

results:

  • age 4 = expect victimizer to feel happy even after being explicitly directed to sadness of victim = phenomenon cannot be explained by lack of probing for additional emotions

limitations:

  • most studies ask children how somebody else feels ("other" attributions), not how they would feel for themselves in the same situation ("self" attributions) = may respond from detached POV + since victimizer engaged in intentional action, it is natural to expect victimizer to feel good