The Effect of Various Negative Emotions on Moral Judgment among University Students

This study investigated the effects of emotion induction on moral judgment. Moral judgments of 144 volunteer students, who were randomly divided in four groups, were assessed by personal and impersonal moral dilemmas as pretest. Then, each group was emotionally induced by one of four 4-minute emotional films (sad, horror, disgusting, or neutral). In the next step, moral judgments of the participants were again assessed by matched dilemmas as posttest. The ANOVA with two within and one between- subjects did not demonstrate significant differences between the four groups in their reaction times to moral judgment. However, the differences between RTs to personal and impersonal dilemmas, apart from emotion induction, were significant (P<0/05). Also RTs and the type of responses to personal and impersonal dilemmas were significantly different before emotion induction relative to posttest. These findings indicate that there are no significant differences between emotional inductions on moral judgments. It seems that emotions per se influence moral judgment and this effect is related to the type of moral judgment.