Justifications of emotional responses to eliciting situations: A narratological approach to the CAD hypothesis

Abstract

The CAD hypothesis holds that there is mapping between the three moral emotions (contempt, anger and disgust) and the three moral codes of community, autonomy and divinity. Different from previous designs to establish correlations between emotions and eliciting situations which instantiate moral codes, this paper takes a narratological approach to the CAD hypothesis by examining the relationships between the three moral emotions and moral judgment relating to the three moral codes in the context of eliciting situations. First, similarity data pertaining to eliciting situations were collected by using the Order k/n-1 with fixed K method. Second, the participants were instructed to write down both their responses and justifications of their responses to the eliciting situations. A narratological analysis of the justifications of responses show that they vary along three variables: narrator, character, and basis (mostly in the form of moral judgment). The descriptive statistics of participants’ responses and of their justifications show that more than a half of responses are in the categories of anger (24.8%), disgust (20.7), and contempt (7.7%) and that about 60% of justifications contain a component of moral judgment based on the three moral codes of autonomy (30.03%), divinity (18.1), and community (11.82%). Correspondence analyses among eliciting situations, emotional responses and the three variables of justifications, together with results from the Multidimensional Scaling analysis of the similarity data, show that the CAD hypothesis is largely supported if mappings are set between the emotions in question and moral judgment concerning the eliciting situations (the basis variable of justification) and that the hypothesis is conditioned by the variable of character.