Other-Condemning Moral Emotions: Anger, Contempt and Disgust

Abstract

This article studies and analyzes three other-condemning moral emotions: anger, contempt, and disgust. We utilize existing psychological theories—appraisal theories of emotion and the CAD triad hypothesis—and incorporate them into a unified framework. A semiformal specification of the elicitation conditions and prototypical coping strategies for the other-condemning emotions are proposed. The appraisal conditions are specified in terms of cognitive and social concepts such as goals, beliefs, actions, control and accountability, while coping strategies are classified as belief-, goal- and intention-affecting strategies, and specified in terms of action specifications. Our conceptual analysis and semiformal specification of the three other-condemning moral emotions are illustrated by means of an example of trolling in the domain of social media.