Associates: Dr. Wing-yee Cheung
Students: Lukas Wolf, Paul Hanel, Carey Wallace

A variety of evidence and argument points to emotion as being crucial for understanding values and their application.  Examples include Adam Smith’s (1759) theory of moral sentiments, recent arguments that moral emotions commit people to prosocial, cooperative behaviour (Bowles & Gintis, 2003; Frank, 1988), and the position of virtue ethicists that emotional reactions are pivotal for understanding virtue.

This project provides the first examination of basic emotional differences in value instantiations. Different instantiations of the same values can differ in the emotional response that they elicit (e.g., anger, disgust). For example, while reading an article about a threat to wildlife from the illegal dumping of toxic waste, the text might cause people to feel anger or sadness. Although abundant prior research has shown basic links between emotion and action, there is a paucity of evidence examining how the instantiation of values with different emotions influences the subsequent application of the values to behaviour. Yet, there are many important potential effects of emotional value instantiations. For instance, repeated instantiation of a value with one specific emotion (e.g., sadness in appeals to help starving children), may lead people either to down-regulate their emotional response over time or to experience the emotion more readily in response to the value. In addition, people who experience an opportunity to ‘vent’ their emotion through value-affirming behaviour may experience a cathartic effect that either enhances or diminishes the likelihood of future value affirmation. Extrapolating from broad swathes of past research on emotion and action (e.g., frustration-aggression hypothesis, learned helplessness), the direction of these effects may depend on the specific emotion, individual differences in value endorsement, orientation toward emotional experiences (e.g., affect intensity, need for affect), and a number of other variables (e.g., ability to act). These factors may help us to better understand the behavioural consequences of different emotions within value instantiations (e.g., for campaigns on environmental issues).

We are examining these issues by conducting a range of experiments asking participants to contemplate value instantiations that elicit different emotional reactions (e.g., anger, gratitude) varying on different basic dimensions (e.g., valence, action orientation, moral context). These experimental manipulations are being repeated for some participants on several occasions, and we are administering measures of the potential moderating variables noted above (e.g., value importance). Analyses are testing whether these manipulations and measures predict subsequent changes in value importance, value-affirming behaviour, and the content of participants’ emotional value instantiations — all within contemporary issues of high importance (e.g., environment, helping behaviour). Together, the data are helping us to arrive at a more complete picture of the role of emotional value instantiation in value and behaviour change.