Personality and Moral Judgment: Self-Transcendence and Openness to Experience as Predictors of Emotion Differentiation

Abstract

This dissertation examined how personality traits (Openness, Self-Transcendence) impact emotion differentiation, a construct that was hypothesized to moderate the effect incidental disgust has on moral judgment. Executive function and the personality trait Cooperativeness were treated as control variables in a series of statistical analyses culminating in a path analysis of all study variables. Several moderators (age, gender, mood, and empathy) also were taken into account for the proposed model. A cross-sectional convenience sample was used which was comprised of 193 adults (ages 18-59, M = 23.1 years; female = 133, male = 56) currently enrolled in higher education. While the path model was not supported, surprising results emerged; specifically, incidental disgust appeared to bias moral judgments significantly, albeit in a way contrary to previous studies. Furthermore, there was a failure to reproduce the alleged effect emotion differentiation has on this relationship. Lastly, personality traits failed to demonstrate anticipated associations with emotion differentiation and moral judgment, a finding that was surprising given that predictions were based on the defining characteristics attributed to them by their underlying personality models. These findings shed light on substantial flaws in current conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of personality, emotion differentiation, and moral judgment. The far-reaching implications on future programs of research as well as clinical and psychoeducational interventions are examined in detail in light of such results.