Effect of subclinical depression on moral judgment dilemmas: a process dissociation approach

Dual-process theory of moral judgment indicates that moral decision-making is guided by emotional or cognitive processing, competing with each other. While emotional processing overwhelms cognitive processing, individuals preferentially make deontological judgments. Further, while cognitive processi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2022-11, Vol.12 (1), p.20065-20065, Article 20065
Main Authors: Yin, Xiyang, Hong, Zijing, Zheng, Yinjia, Ni, Yali
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/477/2811
692/699/476/1414
Cognitive ability
Decision making
Depression
Emotions
Experiments
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Information processing
Judgment
Mental depression
Morals
multidisciplinary
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
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Summary:Dual-process theory of moral judgment indicates that moral decision-making is guided by emotional or cognitive processing, competing with each other. While emotional processing overwhelms cognitive processing, individuals preferentially make deontological judgments. Further, while cognitive processing dominates emotional processing, individuals preferentially make utilitarian judgments. This theory predicts that individuals with subclinical depression associated with emotion regulation deficits may deliver more utilitarian judgments. Experiment 1 indicated that higher depressive symptoms predicted utilitarian judgment. However, previous studies have not determined why individuals with subclinical depression make a utilitarian judgment. Thus, Experiment 2 employed the process-dissociation approach, which can separately measure the relative strength of individual deontological and utilitarian inclinations. Deontological inclination (parameter D ) was associated with emotional processing, whereas utilitarian inclination (parameter U ) was related to cognitive processing. In Experiment 2, the two groups (higher depressive symptoms/minimal depressive symptoms) completed the moral task of the process-dissociation approach to investigate the underlying mechanism. There was a significant interaction effect between the group and parameter of process dissociation. Parameter D in the higher depressive symptoms group was weaker than in the minimal depressive symptoms group. Individuals with subclinical depression bias their utilitarian judgments by making fewer deontological moral judgments.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-022-24473-2