Emotions in sexual morality: Testing the separate elicitors of anger and disgust

Abstract

Recent work suggests that negative moral judgements of sexual activities are informed by disgust and anger. A correlational study (N=62) and an experiment (N=176) examined the specific antecedents that elicit these distinct, though correlated, moral emotions. Participants in Study 1 rated their emotional reactions to, and judgements of, 10 sexual scenarios. Across scenarios, judgements of abnormality predicted disgust independent of anger, and judgements of harm/rights violation predicted anger independent of disgust. Study 2 replicated these results in an experimental design. Participants rated their emotions and judgements in response to behaviours that varied in degree of potential sexual morality violation (non-sexual, heterosexual, homosexual) and rights violation (no harm, indirect harm, direct harm). Judgement of rights violation mediated the effects of harm on anger. Judgements of abnormality, but not other antecedents proposed to elicit moral disgust, mediated the effects of sexual immorality on disgust.

Keywords:

• Anger
• Disgust
• Morality
• Appraisals
• Sexual behaviour

Acknowledgments

We would very much like to thank Prof. Niall Bolger for his statistical advice as we revised this article.

Notes

¹Because the composite anger and disgust indices were so strongly correlated (r = .79, p < .001), we performed parallel analyses using only the face measures, as in Study 1. Study 2's face measures showed less collinearity than the face-plus-verbal composites, and were correlated to a similar degree as the face measures in Study 1 (r = .66 in Study 2 vs. r = .65 in Study 1, both ps < .001). Both for these ANCOVA analyses and the mediation analyses that follow, analyses using the face-only composite revealed the same pattern of significant results with one exception: the difference between disgust in the non-sexual vs. heterosexual conditions was not significant, nor was the mediation of this effect by abnormality appraisals.