The Role of Emotion in Moral Judgments.

This study investigated whether the emotions contempt, anger, and disgust were specifically related to a moral judgment in the category community, autonomy, and divinity respectively according to the CAD-hypothesis (Rozin et al., 1999). In Experiment 1 an emotion (anger, neutral, or disgust) was induced suboptimally or optimally by showing a face. Then a sentence appeared and the participants had to judge the described situation (good or bad) as quickly as possible. In Experiment 2 participants had to read morally bad sentences and had to choose the face (emotion) that the described situation would evoke. No evidence for the CAD-hypothesis was found. The results of both experiments did not support a specific relation between category and emotion.