| Status | 已發表Published |
| How disgust affects moral judgement across age groups | |
Peng, M; Chang, L. 
| |
| 2016-07-01 | |
| Source Publication | Journal of Psychological Science
 |
| ISSN | 2379-0121 |
| Pages | 110-115 |
| Abstract | The disgust emotion has been evolved to avoid disease infection. When the risk of disease is high, people will be more likely to comply with the commonly accepted social rules and practice to reduce the chance of infection. It has been demonstrated that, when primed with the disgust emotion, compared with the neutral emotion, people rate moral transgressions and violations more harshly. However, disgust is not inborn. The disgust emotion responds to parasite pressure not only over evolutionary time, but also over lifetimes. Rozin et al. (2000) proposed a developmental model of disgust that described particular categories of disgust elicitor that appeared in a certain sequence; and Stevenson’s study (2010) demonstrated this model, showing that core disgust developed fi rst, and sociomoral disgust devloped last. Therefore, the relationship between disgust and sociomoral judgment is formed developmentally. However, there have not been studies to examine the development of the disease avoidance function of disgust emotion. In this study, we employed grade 1 (about 7 years old) and grade 4 (about 10 years old) primary school students and adults (about 21 years old) to investigate the infl uence of disgust on moral judgment across ages. Half of the participants fi rst rated a set of disgusting stimuli pictures of feces, dead insects, and rotten foods and then completed the moral judgment, whereas the other half of the participants fi rst completed the moral judgment and then rated the disgusting stimuli. Moral judgment behaviors included some moral violation behaviors (e.g., tearing a friend’s favorite book apart, giving a piece of moldy bread to a homeless person, cutting up the neighbor’s dog that died in an accident and eating it for dinner). The participants rated the disgusting stimuli on a 5-point scale, with the following anchors: really dislike, dislike a bit, unsure, like a bit, and really like. On a 3-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 3 (very much), the participants rated the extent to which each of the three types of behaviors was wrong, the extent to which it deserved punishment, and the extent to which they wanted to make a friend (for primary school student participants) or to be a roommate (for adult participants) with the person committing the moral transgression. The results showed that both adults and grade 4 students under the disgust condition rated the conduct related to moral violations behaviors more harshly than the control group under the control condition. Grade 4 students under the disgusting condition avoided the person committing the moral violation more than the participants under the control condition. However, the same results were not found in primary school students of lower grade. The correlation between the disgust ratings and the critical judgment of moral transgression was statistically signifi cant in the primary school student participants. It is concluded that the infl uence of disgust emotion on moral judgment appears after 7 years old and develops with growth, then stays at a constant level in adulthood. |
| Keyword | disgust moral judgement developmental pathogen avoidance |
| Language | 英語English |
| The Source to Article | PB_Publication |
| PUB ID | 27034 |
| Document Type | Journal article |
| Collection | DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY |
| Corresponding Author | Chang, L. |
| Recommended Citation GB/T 7714 | Peng, M,Chang, L.. How disgust affects moral judgement across age groups[J]. Journal of Psychological Science, 2016, 110-115. |
| APA | Peng, M., & Chang, L. (2016). How disgust affects moral judgement across age groups. Journal of Psychological Science, 110-115. |
| MLA | Peng, M,et al."How disgust affects moral judgement across age groups".Journal of Psychological Science (2016):110-115. |
| Files in This Item: | There are no files associated with this item. | |||||
Items in the repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
Edit Comment