Harm Transgressions Only Induce Anger, Purity Transgressions Only Induce disgust? Experiment Based on Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure

The perspective of cognition in moral judgment has drawn much attention in early research, but more and more evidences from moral judgment researches have shown that moral emotion plays an important role in it. Under the simple context of moral judgment, Rottman and Young (2019) found dosage effect in moral domain, in detail, it has been proved that individuals are sensitive to the change of frequency of harm transgressions, but insensitive to purity transgressions. The mechanism might be the specific type of moral emotion of specific immoral behavior differ with each other that further caused the difference of sensitivity in dosage. But nowadays there are debate that if specific immoral behavior produces specific moral emotion, or specific immoral behavior produces several moral emotions. Our study aimed to explore the mechanism behind dosage effect and solve the questions above. We used implicit relational assessment procedure to find the automatic correspondences of harm violations – angry and purity violations – disgust. The results showed that no matter what type of stimulus are (In study 1, violations sentences matched emotional pictures; In study 2, violation sentences matched emotional words), participants’ reaction to the consistent relationships were faster than inconsistent relationships, that is, the correspondences we proposed were established. In the study 3, we wanted to find (1) if these correspondences were affected by the type of materials in experiment? (2) The total effect size of correspondences can reach to what extent? Single-paper meta-analysis was conducted and results showed medium to large effect size and the correspondences were not affected by materials, which supported moral foundation theory and provided explanations for dosage effect. Discussion further explained results from relational framework theory and the theory of evolution of emotion. This research provides theoretical framework in moral emotions.