Evgeniya Hristova

Emotions and Moral Judgment: A Multimodal Analysis

Recent findings in the field of moral psychology suggest that moral judgment results both from emotional processing and deliberate reasoning. The experimental study uses artificial situations that pose moral dilemmas – a human life have to be sacrificed in order to save more lives. Two factors (physical directness of harm and inevitability of death) are varied in order to explore potential differences in emotional processing and their effects on judgment. Multimodal data is collected and analyzed: moral judgments, skin conductance (as a somatic index of affective processing), and response times (as providing information on deliberation process). Personal-impersonal distinction and inevitability of death are found to influence emotions and judgments in moral dilemmas.

Influence of Induced Mood on the Rating of Emotional Valence and Intensity of Facial Expressions

The current study investigates the influence of mood (sad, happy, or neutral) on the valence/intensity ratings of facial expressions of sad, happy, and neutral emotions. The study uses video clips for mood induction and color photographs of emotional facial expressions. Under these conditions, the results show that participants give more extreme ratings to the emotion displayed (happy or sad) when in happy or sad mood without mood-congruence effects. This effect supports the conclusion that arousal alone may play a role in emotion valence/intensity rating (in contrast to results showing mood congruence in other tasks like emotion recognition and detection of emotional expression change). The explanation proposed in the paper is that experienced arousal might guide judgments about the intensity of emotions expressed by other people – when in a more aroused state, a person tends judge that other people also experience more intense emotions.

Conceptual Spaces for Emotion Identification and Alignment

The paper explores a method for emotion identification based on the mapping of emotional terms to a set of emotion eliciting situations. The method has been applied for emotion words from the Bulgarian language. Situations and words have been evaluated using the valence, arousal, and dominance ratings given by participants. Nine clusters of emotion terms and situations have been identified which allowed to map emotion terms with situations. The mapping method and the results for Bulgarian can be used for cross-group or cross-cultural studies of emotions involving various languages. The possible usage of the results obtained for emotion conceptual space evaluation and emotional alignment of people communicating in social networks is also discussed.