The effect of emotion regulation strategy training on moral judgment among individuals with high and low working memory capacities

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of emotion regulation strategies training on moral judgments with regard to the capacity of working memory. To this end، 158 university students (45 males and 113 females) from Kharazmi University participated in this study. All participants were tested using working memory index. Based on the scores distributions، two groups with high and low working memory abilities were selected for the training sessions. Each group، 14 participants (9 females and 5 males)، was trained emotion regulation strategies for ten sessions. Moral judgments in five different categories (personal، easy personal، difficult personal، impersonal and control dilemmas) were examined in three different stages (before training، at the time of the training and after training). Data were analyzed using mixed analysis of variance. The results showed that there was no significant difference in utilitarian responses and reaction times to moral judgment dilemmas between the two groups with low and high working memory scores. Also، the findings indicated that emotion regulation strategy training resulted in an increase of utilitarian moral choices for all of the moral dilemmas related to control dilemmas. However، emotion regulation strategy training had an effect on the reaction time in response to personal as well as difficult personal moral dilemmas. According to these findings، it seems that emotion regulation strategy training had an effect on utilitarian responses and the reaction time، especially for personal moral dilemmas. This could be considered as an indicator of how emotion regulatory strategy training can influence the emotional response during moral judgments.