Emotion regulation and moral judgment: future avenues of research
Emotion regulation and moral judgment: future avenues of research

Summary/Abstract: The influence of emotion on moral judgments is currently a highly debated field ofresearch in moral psychology. An emerging area in this field concerns the effects of the strategiesthat people use in the regulation of their emotions. So far, the importance of emotional regulationin the area of morality has been stated mainly as empirically untested suggestions. The few empiricalstudies conducted until now did not take into account all emotion regulation strategies, and did notuse experimental designs in order to test their effects on moral judgments. We present the conceptualbackground and the methodological architecture of four studies that we will conduct on this topicin the following two years as part of a research project. The aim of these studies is to find empiricallygroundedanswers to a set of specific research questions by acknowledging the limitations of theprevious approaches. The first study aims to extend the current knowledge on the associations betweenemotion regulation and moral judgment. The second focuses on a potential moral contaminationeffect that emotion regulation strategies, namely suppression, might have in the area of moralevaluations. The third study aims to highlight another hypothesized effect of suppression on moralevaluations, specifically the moral rebound effect, which entails the extension of the influences ofthe emotion being suppressed over the next moral judgment task. Finally, the fourth study aims toexperimentally investigate the differences between suppression and reframing in relation to the othertype of moral judgment, namely moral decisions.

• Details
• Contents