https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1546-955X
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ABSTRACT
People often appear to conflate anger and disgust, seemingly using expressions of both emotions interchangeably in response to moral violations. Yet, anger and moral disgust differ in their antecedents and consequences. These empirical observations are associated with two broad theoretical perspectives: one describes expressions of moral disgust as metaphors for anger, whereas the other describes moral disgust as functionally distinct from anger. Both accounts have received empirical support from separate and seemingly inconsistent literatures. The present study seeks to resolve this inconsistency by focusing on the different ways moral emotions have been measured. We formalise three theoretical models of moral emotions: one in which expressions of disgust are purely associated with anger (but not physiological disgust), one in which disgust and anger are fully separated and have distinct functions, and an integrative model that accommodates both metaphorical use in language and distinctive function. We test these models on responses to moral violations (four studies; N = 1608). Our results suggest that moral disgust has distinct functions, but that expressions of moral disgust are sometimes used to convey moralistic anger. These findings have implications for the theoretical status and measurement of moral emotions.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Catherine Molho, Joshua Tybur, Tom Kupfer, and six anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
Data for Study 1 were collected while both authors were at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Data, code, materials, and supplementary information for all studies and preregistrations for Studies 1, 3, and 4 are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/w5nvz.
Notes
1 We originally hypothesised only simple factor models rather than bifactor models, and specified only the disgust-as-metaphor and the functional model, as well as two additional variants which further separated out pictorial and granular items. We revised these models on the basis of the results from Study 1. For purposes of clarity, here we present the final models from the start, and focus on exploratory results from Study 1 which we tested confirmatorily in Study 3. All models and pre-registered confirmatory analyses for Study 1 are presented in the supplement: https://osf.io/w5nvz.
2 Due to a coding error, in addition, one disgust item was included twice and one anger item was included in two highly similar formulations. These two items were excluded from all analyses.
3 We initially used “global” to describe unspecific expressions of an emotions such as “I felt disgusted”, but decided that these items are better described as “generic”, which emphasises that they are distinct from granular items in that they are less specific about the phenomenology or physiological experience of the emotion.
4 Due to a coding mistake, we omitted the item “I felt disgusted”, which we would also have expected to be rated as very global.
5 The choice of two factors, while theoretically motivated, was supported by eigenvalue-based criteria, see Figure S1. For disgust, we also explored a three-factor solution. This is in line with the distinction between granular measures of disgust relating to surface guarding (“I felt my skin crawl”) and ingestion and contamination reduction (“I felt like gagging”) made by Kupfer et al. (Citation2021). We broadly replicate this distinction; for details, see SI. All items selected for the final scale loaded on the contamination reduction factor, with minimal crossloadings on the surface guarding factor (all <.19).
6 We also present closer replications of the studies by Molho et al. (Citation2017) in the supplementary materials, using their analytic strategy.