| dc.description.abstract | Research has shown that the valence of emotional linguistic stimuli is reflected in corrugator supercilii
(‘frowning muscle’) activation, which can be measured using facial electromyography. But in a larger
context, the corrugator response may be additionally affected by emotional evaluation, i.e., how we
feel about some emotion. An earlier study from 2019 found that descriptions of moral characters
experiencing negative emotions elicited substantially more corrugator activity than positive emotions,
thus reflecting valence, but they found no effect of valence for adjectives describing immoral
characters. The authors therefore suggested that both mental simulation of word valence and moral
evaluation may drive corrugator activation, e.g., mentally simulating ‘angry’ activates the corrugator
and ‘happy’ relaxes it, whereas evaluation may elicit relaxation for both moral-positive and
immoral-negative stories. This is based on the idea that good people deserve good things and bad people
deserve bad things. More research was needed to corroborate the existence of these two effects
opposing each other. This current study therefore used the same narratives but with an additional
task that requested participants to explicitly judge the behavior with a rating task. This was
hypothesized to increase their tendency to evaluate what they read and subsequently change the net
result that the postulated two effects should have. Critically, we expected more frowning for bad
people experiencing positive emotions than negative emotions since bad people feeling good should
be seen as very unfair. However, this is not what we found, and our study in fact replicated the findings
from 2019: a null result of valence for adjectives describing immoral characters and a large valence-based effect for adjectives describing moral characters. Surprisingly, we did find the expected
evaluation-based pattern in responses on an exploratory task where we asked participants to rate the
fairness of every narratives’ ending. Finally, we found preliminary evidence that a person’s attitude
towards justice, i.e., their preference or desire for morally good people being rewarded and morally
bad people being punished, as a personality trait may modulate the effect that morality and valence
have on their corrugator responses. | |
