For the moral emotions, researchers have had controversial views which lie in how to understand the prototypical features of moral emotions. Some people think that moral emotion is the feeling based on moral evaluation, links with others’ or social’s interests and well-being, and only those with disinterested elicitors and pro-social action tendencies can be called moral emotions. While other people suggest that almost all emotion relate with moral in nature, so all right emotion that are felt appropriately at a right time can be regarded as moral emotions.
On the teenagers’ view, what kind of emotion can be considered as moral emotion? In order to understand their implicit theory about moral emotions in daily life, in this study, 974 middle school students from 14 to 16 years old were gathered to finish two researches consisted of vocabulary assessment and situation assessment, so as to examine their implicit view of typical categories and prototypical features of moral emotions.
In the first study, 42 filtered emotional vocabularies were provided, such as joy, anger, compassion. Subjects were asked to assess the degree of compliance these terms to moral emotion according to their own understanding. On this basis, factor analysis was used to explore the structure of 28 emotional vocabularies whose mean were higher than the theory median. The results showed that, more positive emotion vocabularies, such as gratitude, touch, happy, respect and other terms obtained relatively high rating scores. This means that young people tended to regard positive emotions as moral emotions. Furthermore, young students’ approving principal moral emotions can be reduced into five types: negative-situational emotions, other-guiding emotions, positive-situational emotions, self-critical emotion, and other-praising emotions. Negative-situational emotions and positive-situational emotions are not necessarily as moral emotions, but as common experiences in daily life, they are easily turned to be forms of moral feelings in certain situations. Other-guiding emotions involved in both positive feelings and negative feelings associated with witnessing greatness, good deeds or adversity. It had the commonality of other people-oriented, and a significant role in guiding the ethical behavior. Self-critical emotions is the negative emotions directed at self for violating moral codes, whereas other-praising emotions is the positive feelings associated with witnessing others’ power and ability.
The second study took two kinds of positive emotion and negative emotion as examples, elicitor and action tendency as context dimensions, required the subjects to assess the conformity between characters’ emotions in 16 situational items and the moral emotions. The results showed that, compared with action tendency model, emotional valence model, emotional type model, and mixture model of elicitor and action tendency, elicitor model became relatively optimal model. That was to say, middle school students are significantly inclined to clustering differentiate emotions according to their elicitors, and regarded disinterested elicitors as sole prototypical feature of moral emotions. Besides, the result of 2×2×2 Repeated Measures with covariance showed that there were no significant effects of grade, gender and emotions valence on adolescents’ implicit theory for the moral emotions, except for emotion’s elicitor. The rating scores of emotions triggered by disinterested elicitors were significantly higher than those triggered by the elicitors related to self interests.
Key words
Moral emotion /
Middle school students /
Implicit view /
Elicitor
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