Running Head: THE WORD MORAL

CAD Revisited:

Effects of the Word “Moral” on the Moral Relevance of Disgust (and Other Emotions)

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Abstract

The CAD model posits a mapping of contempt, anger, and disgust onto the moral codes of

community, autonomy, and divinity (respectively). A recent study by Hutcherson and Gross

[Hutcherson, C.A. & Gross, J.J. (2011). The moral emotions: A social-functionalist account

of anger, disgust, and contempt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,100,719-737]

posited moral disgust as the dominant other-condemning emotion across all three moral

codes. However, the methodology used may have incidentally increased the relevance of

disgust. In the current experiment, one condition repeated Hutcherson and Gross’ procedure,

while in another condition we added the word “moral” to three other emotions. Consistent

with CAD, anger had the highest intensity ratings in response to autonomy violations,

whereas “grossed out” was the dominant response to divinity violations. Furthermore, the

adjective “moral” increased the relevance of anger, contempt, and fear in irrelevant domains,

which suggests that the adjective "moral" increases any emotion’s moral relevance.

Keywords: disgust, anger, contempt, moral, CAD

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CAD Revisited:

Effects of the Word “Moral” on the Moral Relevance of Disgust (and Other Emotions)

Recent research has emphasized the role that emotions play in our moral judgments. It

has been suggested that emotions often guide our approval or condemnation for the actions of

others (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Haidt, 2001; Prinz, 2007;

Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999; Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008; Wheatley &

Haidt, 2005). TIn particular, the moral emotion of disgust has attracted a large amount of

research attention. ResearchersIn particular, researchers have proposed different theories of

the role that disgust plays in morality, as distinct from anger and contempt. However, to date

it is difficult to bring understanding to this research field because these morally-condemning

emotions have been measured using different methodology. Therefore, the literature to date

leaves open the questions of how we should define moral disgust, and what measures should

be used to study it to study this moral emotion. The current research has implications for both

of these essential questions.

The CAD hypothesis suggests that disgust plays a unique role in morality (Rozin et

al., 1999). It proposes that the “other-condemning” moral emotions of contempt, anger, and

disgust correspond to violations of three distinct moral codes, proposed by Shweder, Much,

Mahapatra, and Park (1997)—with contempt corresponding to violations of community

violations (or the duties and obligations of a social role or class); anger corresponding to

violations of autonomy violations (or the rights of an individual), and disgust corresponding

to violations of divinity violations (or the religious and natural order). In the initial tests of the

CAD model, Rozin et al. had American and Japanese students indicate how much they would

feel anger, disgust, and contempt towards 46 immoral acts, each related to one of the three

moral codes. The results were generally supportedtive of the proposed mapping between the

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other-condemning emotions and the three moral domains. The only exception was that the

mapping of contempt- to community associationviolations was relatively weaker than anger-

autonomy and disgust-divinity. A particular strength of this research is that it used both

emotion words and facial emotion displays to measure anger, disgust, and contempt. This

method is useful because previous research has found that the semantic terms “anger” and

“disgust” are frequently correlated and often used interchangeably (Johnson-Laird & Oatley,

1989; J. A. Russell & Fehr, 1994; Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O'Connor, 1987).

Additionally, Ekman, O’Sullivan, and Matsumoto (1991) have argued that individuals cannot

reliably label contempt because English speakers often do not know what the term means.

Indeed, when assessed via open choice, subjects do not reliably label the contempt expression

as “contempt” (Wagner, 2000).

However, other research has put forth the statedargument that disgust is sovereign to

all kinds of immoral acts, not just limited to divinity violations (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011;

cf. Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 1993; Haidt, Rozin, MacCauley & Imada, 1997). Research by

Hutcherson and Gross (2011) has endeavored to determine whether moral disgust is the

predominant response to all three CAD domainsmoral codes. In Study 1 they researchers

replicated and extended studies by Rozin et al. (1999), however, they only used emotion

words. They sought to make clear to participants a distinction between moral and non-moral

disgust by affixing the term “moral” to disgust, and by giving participants thean alternative

emotion term “grossed out” as an option for non-moral disgust. These researchers predicted

that participants would have a preference for moral disgust as their emotional response

toward all three CAD violations, in comparison to other moral (anger, contempt) and non-

moral emotions (sadness, fear/anxiety, and grossed out). TIndeed, they found that moral

disgust was experienced more intensely than any other emotion in response to both

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community and autonomy violations, though not divinity violations (which elicited both

moral and non-moral disgust).

It was admirable that this research tried to distinguish different forms of disgust.

However, one limitation of their approach was that by affixing the term “moral” to the

emotion “disgust,” while omitting “moral” from all the other emotions, they authors might

have incidentally increased the relevance of this combined “moral + disgust” term as a

response to all moral violations. In other words, the preferential selection of the item “moral

disgust” as a response to autonomy and community violations may simply be an artefact of

the suitability of the word “moral” to a moral context. Thus, the term “moral disgust” may

not capture a distinct type of disgust, but is simply perceived as a suitable response to all

moral violations because of the moral connotation.

In the present study, we sought to examine whether the word “moral” influences the

relevance of emotion terms to the three CAD domains. Specifically, we sought to determine

if adding the term “moral” to the other CAD emotions of anger and contempt—or even to a

non-moral negative emotion such as fear—would influence the intensity and preference for

these emotions as suitable responses to the three CAD domainsmoral violations. We

hypothesized that simply adding the word “moral” to emotions (, such as anger, contempt,

and fear), would increase their judged relevance to any moral violation. Furthermore, we

reasoned that if this effect reflects a semantic artefact rather than a genuine expression of a

morally relevant emotion, and the CAD model is overall valid, then the effect of adding the

word “moral” should be particularly strong in emotion-domain combinations where the CAD

model predicts the emotion should be less relevant (that is, community and divinity for anger,

autonomy and divinity for contempt, and all domains for fear).

To test our hypothesis, the present experiment we present here includes a duplicate of

Hutcherson and Gross’ (2011) Study 1 as a control condition, and a comparison condition in

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which, in addition to the term “moral disgust,” the word “moral” was affixed to the other-

condemning moral emotions of anger and contempt, and. In this other condition we also

added “moral” to the emotion of al term “fear/anxiety”, which is normally classed as a non-

moral emotionnot usually classed among the morally relevant emotions (e.g., see Haidt,

2003).

We reasoned that the adjective “moral” itself would increase the perceived relevance

of the non-disgust emotion terms as moral responses. However, even with the word “moral”

added to these terms, we did not expect these terms to eclipse the relevance of non-moral

disgust (i.e., “grossed out”) as the dominant response to divinity violations, given research

that suggests disgust is the prototypical emotional response to violations of this type (see

Gutierrez, Giner-Sorolla, & Vasiljevic, in press; Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009; P.

S. Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011a, b, c). Additionally, consistent with the CAD perspective

and other research indicating strong links between anger and harm/injustice (e.g., Lerner,

Goldberg, & Tetlock, 1998; Miller, 2001), we expected that anger would beemerge as the

most relevant emotion for autonomy violations. Finally, we reserved making a hypothesis

regarding community violations, as findings on this emotion/domain have been less

consistent.

Method

Participants

Participants were 245 adults (128 male, 116 female, 1 did not disclose) who

participated via the Mechanical Turk online job service in exchange for compensation.

Mechanical Turk was used to recruit a more diverse samplesample of participants (in terms

of gender, age, ethnicity, and education) than generally obtained via university samples (see

Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011). The mean age of the sample was 31.11 years (SD =

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11.70). NThe nationalities werey of the sample was 58.4% United States, 29.4% Indian, and

12.2% other nationalities. EThe ethnicity of the sample was fairly diverse: 54.3%

White/Caucasian, 35.5% Asian, 3.7% Latin American/Hispanic, 3.7% Black/African

American/African Caribbean, and 2.9% mixed or other ethnicity.

Design

We used a single factor (pure replication vs. moral version) between-subjects design.

The between-subjects variable was whether the word “moral” was affixed to the emotion

terms anger, contempt, and fear/anxiety (i.e., “moral anger”, “moral contempt”, “moral

fear/anxiety”) or not. IThus, in the pure replication (n = 111), participants were provided the

following emotion labels: anger, contempt, moral disgust, sadness, fear/anxiety, and grossed

out. In the moral version (n = 134), the choices were: moral anger, moral contempt, moral

disgust, sadness, moral fear/anxiety, and grossed out.

Materials and procedure

WeOur materials and procedures were modeled our study after Hutcherson and

Gross’s Study 1 (2011, Study 1), with only a few amendments. First, Hutcherson and Gross

(2011) included only two divinity vignettes, though they included nine autonomy and 12

community vignettes. We agree with Hutcherson and Gross that many of the actions offered

by Rozin et al. (1999) as divinity violations do not qualify as moral transgressions (e.g.,

eating rotten meat), but we thought the scarcity of divinity items presented a methodological

limitation. Thus, we adapted four items from Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (2009), which they

used to assess attitudes towards “purity” violations (a reconceptualization of the CAD

divinity category). These items were: (a) someone gets plastic surgery done that adds a 2-inch

tail on the end of their spine; (b) someone cooks and eats their pet dog, after it dies of natural

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causes; (c) a dance group performs an art piece in which all participants act like animals for

30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage; and (d) a man goes to

the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken, but before cooking the chicken, he has

sexual intercourse with it. Though it could be argued these acts have no direct consequences

for people other than the actors themselves, and thus do not represent “moral” actions,

Graham et al. (2009) have found that some people do treat these actions as moral violations—

that is, they believe the acts are punishable, universally wrong, and are extremely reluctant to

engage in these actions (see also Nichols, 2002, for similar argument about disgusting acts).

Thus, in all, we had six divinity items and 27 total violations.

Second, vignettesmoral violations were presented in the random order used by Rozin

et al. (1999), —mixing items from different groups—as opposed to grouping items together

by violation type. This was done to avoid participants perceiving any conceptual connections

between the items, and thus treating them uniformly by CAD domain. In Hutcherson and

Gross (2011), unlike the original Rozin et al. (1999) study, vignettes were presented in

blocks, with the autonomy violations first, followed by community and then divinity

violations (C. Hutcherson, personal communication, June 8 2011). Participants may have thus

selected “moral disgust” most strongly for autonomy violations because they had not seen

any divinity violations yet, and wanted to express their moral disapproval using any emotion

of condemnation with “moral” attached to it. However, if scenarios had been presented in a

random or varied order, the greater applicability of moral disgust to divinity violations, and

anger to autonomy violations, might have become more evident. We therefore presented

scenarios in a mixed order in our study.

Lastly, and most importantly, we included a second condition in which other

emotions, including anger, contempt, and fear/anxiety, received the adjective “moral”, in

addition to “moral” disgust, which appeared as an item across conditions. Participants were

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given the same written instructions provided by Hutcherson and Gross (2011,; see Study 1).

For each violation, participants made two different ratings. First, they were instructed to

indicate how much of each of the emotions listed they would feel at toward the actions/events

described, on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 5 (extremely). Secondly, they were instructed to

select the emotion that best described their overall reaction to the action/event from the six

options provided. Upon completion of the task, participants were debriefed and compensated.

Results

Main analyses

Emotional intensity ratings were aggregated by CAD violation type , producing

separate means for autonomy, community, and divinity violations (see Table 1 for means and

standard deviations as a function of condition). Following Hutcherson and Gross, we

conducted paired t tests on emotional intensity ratings for all 15 combinations of emotion

pairs, reporting significant differences below a threshold of p < .003, the Bonferroni-

corrected alpha level for 15 comparisons (.05/15). We conducted this analysis both on the

entire sample and with participants with a self-reported U.S. nationality only. The results

were almost identical; thus, we report here the results for the entire sample. We also report

the frequency with which each emotion was selected as the best descriptive term (see Table 2

for frequencies and percentages as a function of condition and violation type). Though there

were a few main effects of gender on emotion intensity, particularly indicating that women

(M = 4.92, SD = 1.05) more than men (M = 4.38, SD = 1.04) were grossed out by divinity

violations, F(1, 240) = 16.04, p < .001, and men (M = 2.63, SD = 1.43) more than women (M

= 1.92, SD = 1.22) were grossed out by community violations, F(1, 240) = 17.02, p < .001,

there were no interactions at all between gender and condition. We therefore report the results

collapsing across gender, similar to Hutcherson and Gross. Finally, we conducted a one-way

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MANOVA of condition on emotion intensity ratings for autonomy, community, and divinity

violations to test the effects of the word “moral” on these ratings.

[Insert Tables 1 and 2 about here]

Across the nine autonomy violations and in both conditions, anger was given the

highest mean intensity rating, compared to the other emotions (see Table 1), consistent with

the CAD model. Moreover, anger received significantly higher intensity ratings than all other

emotions in both conditions. Moral disgust received the second highest intensity ratings, but

only significantly higher intensity ratings than contempt in the pure replication (i.e., moral

disgust and moral contempt were rated equally intense in the moral version). Sadness, fear,

and grossed out were rated significantly lower than the other emotions in both conditions.

Consistent with the intensity ratings, anger was selected as the best descriptive emotion for

autonomy violations in both conditions. Analysis of the effects of condition within autonomy

violations revealed an increased preference for the emotions contempt, F(1, 243) = 5.11, p

< .03, and fear/anxiety¸ F(1, 243) = 14.59, p < .001, simply due to affixing the word “moral”

to these terms. Sadness was also chosen to a greater extent in the moral version, compared to

the pure replication, F(1, 243) = 5.78, p < .02, though it did not receive the “moral” affixture

(all other ps > .10).

Across the 12 community violations, anger was given the highest intensity ratings

above all other emotions. However, in neither condition was anger rated significantly higher

than moral disgust, and in the moral version, moral contempt was rated on par with moral

anger, moral disgust, and sadness. Again, grossed out and fear were rated significantly lower

than the other emotions, in both versions. Consistent with the intensity ratings, anger was

selected as the best descriptive emotion for this domain in the pure replication. However, in

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the moral version, the non-moral emotion of sadness was selected as the best descriptive

emotion for community violations. Nevertheless, moral anger and moral contempt were also

selected at a fairly high rate. Regarding the effects of the word “moral” for community

violations, there was an increased preference for moral fear/anxiety than for non-moral

fear/anxiety, F(1, 243) = 7.67, p < .01. No other emotion differed in this group due to

condition, ps > .10.

Across the six divinity violations, as expected, grossed out (i.e., non-moral disgust)

was given the highest intensity ratings above all other emotions. However, in both conditions,

it was not rated significantly higher than moral disgust. This is most likely due to participants

treating grossed out and moral disgust as a single construct (see factor analysis below).

Across conditions, anger, contempt, sadness, and fear were rated significantly lower than

moral and non-moral disgust in this domain. Consistent with emotion intensity ratings,

grossed out was rated the best descriptive emotion for this domain, though moral disgust was

also highly rated. Finally, regarding the effects of condition for divinity violations, there was

an increased preference for moral anger compared to anger, F(1, 243) = 4.66, p < .04, moral

contempt compared to contempt, F(1, 243) = 5.15, p < .03, and moral fear/anxiety compared

to fear/anxiety, F(1, 243) = 8.41, p < .01, in this domain. No other significant differences

were observed in this group due to condition, ps > .12.

Emotion factors emerging in each CAD domain

To test the assumption that participants treated moral and non-moral disgust as one

construct in the divinity domain, we conducted three one factor analyses analysis (with

Varimax rotation) to assess the emotion factors for each moral domain (autonomy,

community, divinity). We used parallel analysis (O’Connor, 2000) as our extraction method.

The factor structures were identical across condition (i.e., replication and moral version);

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thus, here we report the results collapsing across condition. One thousand random datasets

were created, each of which had 245 cases and six variables. In 95% of the randomly

generated datasets, the first three eigenvalues were 1.21, 1.11, and 1.03. Only eigenvalues

exceeding those derived by chance were retained. For autonomy violations, we obtained a

two-factor solution (eigenvalues = 3.40, 1.33), accounting for 78.8% of the total variance.

Anger, contempt, and moral disgust loaded to the first factor; grossed out, fear, and sadness

loaded to the second factor. For community violations, a single factor was obtained

(eigenvalue = 4.67), accounting for 77.8% of the total variance, with all six emotions loading

together above .84. For divinity violations, the predicted two-factor solution was obtained

(eigenvalues = 3.60, 1.13), accounting for 78.9% of the total variance. Fear, sadness, anger,

and contempt loaded to one factor, while grossed out and moral disgust loaded to another.

Thus, of all the emotions, moral disgust had the most ambivalent loading: loading with anger

and contempt when for participants evaluated autonomy violations; loading with all the other

emotions fori n relation to community violations; and loading with grossed out for divinity

violations. This supports the contention that the term “disgust,” even when clarified as “moral

disgust”, has different meanings to people depending on the moral context.

Discussion

In the present study, we found that one consequence of affixing the word “moral” to a

moral emotion term—including anger, contempt, and disgust—is to increases the emotion’s

perceived relevance as a response to a moral transgression. Moreover, we also found that the

addition of the word “moral” can even increase the relevance of a negative non-moral

emotion not usually classified as moral in nature (fear/anxiety). Consistent with our

predictions and the CAD model, yet less consistent with the findings of Hutcherson and

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Gross’ findings, for violations of autonomy, anger had the highest intensity ratings and was

selected as most relevant emotion across conditions (i.e., in both the pure replication and the

moral version). Adding the word “moral” to contempt in our study increased its intensity in

the autonomy domain on par with moral disgust. Also consistent with predictions and the

CAD model and somewhat consistent with Hutcherson and Gross, for divinity violations,

grossed out (i.e., non-moral disgust) hadwas given the highest intensity ratings and was

selected as the best descriptive emotion across conditions, though moral disgust was also

highly relevant. However, the relevance of moral disgust for divinity violations can be

attributed to participants treating the moral and non-moral disgust as a single construct in this

domain, as confirmed by factor analysis.

The factor analysis further revealed context effects of the CAD domains on the

meaning of the term “moral disgust.” In response to divinity violations, moral and non-moral

disgust loaded onto a single construct. This was not the casetrue for other types of violations;,

for example, moral disgust loaded with anger and contempt in the autonomy domain, separate

from non-moral disgust. This finding is consistent withsupports the idea that the word

“disgust” signifies a state closer to anger, when applied to autonomy violations (e.g., see

Bloom, 2004), and the addition of the word “moral” seems to only enhance the use of this

metaphor. This reinforces other findings that disgust language is most separate from anger

when reacting to bodily violationsdivinity violations, e.g., a sexual or eating moral norm

(Gutierrez, Giner-Sorolla, & Vasiljevic, in press; P.S. Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011a, b, c).

In the context of non-bodily violationsautonomy violations, e. g. of harm or fairness norms,

these studies showed that the expression “moral disgust” is was more strongly related to

anger than to non-moral disgust.

Results for community violations were less conclusive. Contrary to both the CAD

model and Hutcherson and Gross’ findings, across conditionsin community violations had

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anger was the most strongly felt emotion, and anger was selected as the best descriptive

emotion in the pure replication. In the moral version, sadness (a non-moral emotion) was

selected as the most relevant emotion to community violations. OThus, overall our results

support at least the “AD” mappings of the CAD model, while further demonstrating the

inconsistent nature of the “C” mapping. We suspect that sadness was selected as the best

descriptive emotion forwas related to community violations in the moral version of the study

because community violations tend to be viewed as less serious offenses than autonomy and

divinity violations (see Rozin et al., 1999). Many of our participants may not have considered

community violations as serious as the other moral offenses, as shown by their generally

lower negative emotion means in our study. This may explain why they found the only non-

moral, non-disgust emotion as the best descriptive emotion in this case—they were searching

for an emotion category that would not connote express strong moral condemnation, and

sadness was the only option available to them. This rationale is supported by the fact

thatSupporting this explanation, anger was selected as the best descriptive emotion for this

domain in the pure replication condition (i.e., when other negative emotions without the term

“moral” were available), but not the moral version. These finding also suggests a limitation of

the original CAD studies (Rozin et al., 1999), which did not provide participants with a non-

moral, negative emotion option.

In Hutcherson and Gross’s study, and contrasting withunlike previous research, moral

disgust was rated significantly higher than anger for autonomy violations, though anger was

rated quite high as well. However, in this experiment we found that anger was the dominant

response to autonomy violations, thus, replicating Rozin et al.’s (1999) original finding. TA

plausible reason for this may have to do with the different characters ofdifferences between

our samples. We used an older non-university sample, whereas Hutcherson and Gross used a

younger university sample. It may be that college students are more flexible with their use of

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the term “disgust” when responding to autonomy violations, whereas non-students prefer

anger as their prototype moral emotion in this domain. Perhaps educational level or English-

language proficiency influences whether anger or moral disgust is preferred as a n emotional

response to autonomy violations. Though we did not collect this demographic information in

our researchstudy, a recent study of 1,000 MTurk workers suggests showed that both

Americans and Indians workers are likely to have at least a college-level education (Ipeirotis,

2010). This suggests that our MTurk sample, which was comprised of mainly American and

Indian workers, may not be very different from Hutcherson and Gross’s sample in terms of

educational level. Furthermore, English-language proficiency may not be the primary source

of the difference, as our results were the same even with non-Americans removed from the

sample. Whatever the reason for the difference, future studies using both terminological and

facial-display items are certainly needed to more carefully tease apart the role of anger and

disgust as reactions to autonomy violations, since previous research indicates that this ishas

suggested that this may be a reliable method of dealing with problems (e.g., local

idiosyncrasies) of the English language.

One potential limitation of our methodology is that we did not include a condition

where the term “disgust” was presented without the adjective “moral”. Instead, we followed

the procedure used by Hutcherson and Gross, and provided participants with the synonym

“grossed out” as a stand-in for the term “disgust”. We argue that greater endorsement of

“moral disgust” compared to non-moral “grossed out”, as a response to community and

autonomy violations in our study and Hutcherson and Gross’s study may be attributed to the

addition of the word “moral” to the disgust term. Alternatively, it could be that some third

variable that distinguishes moral disgust from the other moral emotions moral anger, moral

contempt, and moral fear, better accounts for the enhanced endorsement of moral disgust.

PFor example, perhaps native English speakers understand the meaning of moral disgust,

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while finding the terms “moral anger”, “moral contempt”, and “moral fear” unclear. This

inscrutability may have , in turn, caused participants in our study to attend more avidly to the

word “moral” when applying these terms. To investigate this possibility, we asked conducted

a brief pilot study. Eightyeighty-two American English-speakers rated how certain they were

that they understood the meaning of the four moral-emotion terms on a 9-point scale (1 = Not

at all certain of its meaning; 5 = Moderately certain of its meaning; 9 = Very certain of its

meaning). We found that participants were certain of the meaning of moral anger (M = 5.94,

SD = 2.57), moral disgust (M = 6.51, SD = 2.34), and moral contempt (M = 6.17, SD = 2.35),

all above the midpoint of the scale, though less certain of the meaning of moral fear (M =

4.83, SD = 2.67), slightly below the midpoint. These results, along with the fact that the

moral terms were endorsed to a greater extent than their non-moral counterparts, make it

unlikely that differences in comprehension are behind the effect “moral” had on the emotion

terms in our study.

Implications for using the word “moral” to qualify disgust

In our moral version of the our study, the word “moral” had the predicted

“moralizing” effect on emotion ratings. TIn other words, the word “moral””Moral” seemed to

increase the relevance of various emotions as responses to moral transgressions, but only

when the emotion by itself was not recognized as a prevailing response to the scenario.

Across the three CAD domains, affixing “moral” to fear/anxiety significantly increased the

initially low intensity ratings of this emotion. Moreover, the word “moral” also increased the

intensity of the moral emotions of anger and contempt in domains where the CAD model and

our findings predicts these emotions should not be relevant. Therefore, it seems that adding

the word “moral” can increase the perceived relevance of any emotion term to a moral

situation, including ones not usually thought of as having moral relevance.

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The present findings hafindings have ve theoretical and empirical implications for

researchers who studying the other-condemning moral emotions. This research suggests that

it is important for rResearchers shouldto take care when measuring moral emotions because

participants may not agree with researchers on the meaning of emotion terms, such as moral

disgust or contempt. Moreover, our findings warn against adopting the term “moral disgust”

as a measure of disgust in moral contexts, as the adjective “moral” does not seem to increase

the intensity of theoretically relevant emotion responses, only. It does however increase the

intensity of non-relevant ones. This raises questions about whether the “moral” adjective is

really getting at a distinctt emotional state, or just awareness about the applicability of the

moral context to the item. In some ways asking about “moral disgust” and not moral anger or

contempt is similar to asking whether a fire engine is burgundy, vermilion or “fire-engine

red.”

Drawing overly fine distinctions in trying to measure different kinds of disgust not

only risks the methodological error of double-barrelled item construction, but also risks

ignoring disgust’s most interesting feature – that a similar response governs reactions to

disease cues, blood and gore, deformity, threats to human essence, violation of bodily-moral

norm violations, and possibly other moral violations transgressions (see Keltner & Haidt,

1999). Rather than search for moral subspecies of emotions of emotions, we think it more

fruitful to recognize that the same emotion can be feltappear in moral and non-moral

contexts. The unreliability of single terms in measuring disgust and contempt also highlights

the necessity of measuring moral emotions using multiple methods (e.g., emotion synonyms,

facial expression endorsement, facial reactions, and physiological responses). AFor example,

across multiple lines of research it has been found that reactions of anger and disgust can be

distinguished when both verbal reports and facial displays were measured (see Gutierrez &

Giner-Sorolla, 2007; Gutierrez, Vasiljevic, & Giner-Sorolla, in press; P. S. Russell & Giner-

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Sorolla, 2011a). Finally, this research reinforces a body of existing evidence that disgust

(considered separately from contempt and anger) applies primarily to moral contexts that

variously have been described as “divinity,” “purity,” or “bodily-moral” violations. This in

turn may help researchers further understand crucial differences within this emotion family.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Bernhard Leidner for his assistance with this research.

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Table 1

Emotion Intensity Ratings forin the Context of Community, Autonomy, and Divinity Violations (Aggregated) as a Function of Condition.

Anger/Moral

Anger

Contempt/Moral

Contempt

Moral Disgust Sadness Fear/Moral Fear Grossed Out

Code M SD M SD M SD M SD M SD M SD

Replication A 4.42a (0.91) 3.94c (1.20) 4.22b (0.83) 3.47d (1.05) 2.90e (1.16) 2.63f (1.33)

Moral Version A 4.51a (0.90) 4.27b (1.06) 4.28b (0.93) 3.79c (1.00) 3.46d (1.13) 2.91e (1.33)

Replication C 3.29a (1.06) 3.07b (0.99) 3.22a (1.00) 3.08b (0.93) 2.24c (1.18) 2.21c (1.36)

Moral Version C 3.38a (1.08) 3.28a (1.04) 3.29a (1.09) 3.27a (1.00) 2.68b (1.26) 2.37c (1.39)

Replication D 3.47b (1.310 3.45b (1.24) 4.37a (1.06) 3.52bc (1.14) 2.76c (1.30) 4.54a (1.02)

Moral Version D 3.84b (1.32) 3.82b (1.33) 4.59a (1.14) 3.72bc (1.24) 3.28c (1.50) 4.71a (1.12)

Note. Emotions within a row that share a superscript do not differ significantly at p < .003. The highest emotion intensity rating for each row is

shown in boldface. Replication = pure replication of Hutcherson and Gross (2011, Study 1) with the adjective “moral” only for disgust (N =

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111). Moral Version = replication of Hutcherson and Gross (2011, Study 1) with the adjective “moral” for anger, contempt, disgust, and fear (N

= 134). A = autonomy violations (9 items); C = community violations (12 items); D = divinity violations (6 items).

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Table 2

Frequency of “Best Descriptive” Emotion for Community, Autonomy, and Divinity Violations (Aggregated) as a Function of Condition.

Anger/Moral

Anger

Contempt/Moral

Contempt

Moral Disgust Sadness Fear/Moral Fear Grossed Out

Code Count % Count % Count % Count % Count % Count %

Replication A 376 38.4 127 13.0 242 24.7 125 12.8 88 9.0 22 2.2

Moral Version A 420 35.1 206 17.2 218 18.2 189 15.8 123 10.3 40 3.3

Replication C 319 24.2 266 20.2 285 21.6 308 23.4 95 7.2 44 3.3

Moral Version C 337 21.2 326 20.5 281 17.7 423 26.6 175 11.0 48 3.0

Replication D 89 13.4 49 7.4 180 27.1 67 10.1 22 3.3 256 38.6

Moral Version D 71 8.9 66 8.3 251 31.5 89 11.2 32 4.0 288 36.1

Note. Highest percentage of “best descriptive” emotion for each row is shown in boldface. Replication = pure replication of Hutcherson and

Gross (2011, Study 1) with the adjective “moral” only for disgust (N = 111). Moral Version = replication of Hutcherson and Gross (2011, Study

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1) with the adjective “moral” for anger, contempt, disgust, and fear (N = 134). A = autonomy violations (9 items); C = community violations (12

items); D = divinity violations (6 items).

29