Defensive emotions and evaluative judgements: Sensitivity to anger and fear predicts moral judgements, whereas sensitivity to disgust predicts aesthetic judgements

Autor: Alejandro Dorado, Martin Skov, Jaume Rosselló, Marcos Nadal
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: British Journal of Psychology. 114:1-20
ISSN: 2044-8295
0007-1269
DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12590
Popis: Aesthetic and moral evaluations engage appetitive and defensive emotions. While the role played by pleasure in positive aesthetic and moral judgements has been extensively researched, little is known about how defensive emotions influence negative aesthetic and moral judgements. Specifically, it is unknown which defensive emotions such judgements tap into, and whether both kinds of judgement share a common emotional root. Here, we investigated how participants' individual sensitivity to disgust, fear, anger and sadness predicted subjective judgements of aesthetic and moral stimuli. Bayesian modelling revealed that participants who were more sensitive to anger and fear found conventional and moral transgressions more wrong. In contrast, participants who were more sensitive to disgust disliked asymmetrical geometric patterns and untidy rooms more. These findings suggest that aesthetic and moral evaluations engage multiple defensive emotions, not just disgust, and that they may rely on different defensive emotions as part of their computational mechanism.
Databáze: OpenAIRE