The role of emotional awareness in evaluative judgment: evidence from alexithymia

Evaluative judgments imply positive or negative regard. But there are different ways in which something can be positive or negative. How do we tell them apart? According to Evaluative Sentimentalism, different evaluations (e.g., dangerousness vs. offensiveness) are grounded on different emotions (e....

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2023-03, Vol.13 (1), p.5183-5183, Article 5183
Main Authors: Díaz, Rodrigo, Prinz, Jesse
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/477
631/477/2811
Alexithymia
Anger
Awareness
Emotions
Fear
Humanities and Social Sciences
Hypotheses
Judgment
Morality
multidisciplinary
Rationalism
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Violations
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Evaluative judgments imply positive or negative regard. But there are different ways in which something can be positive or negative. How do we tell them apart? According to Evaluative Sentimentalism, different evaluations (e.g., dangerousness vs. offensiveness) are grounded on different emotions (e.g., fear vs. anger). If this is the case, evaluation differentiation requires emotional awareness. Here, we test this hypothesis by looking at alexithymia, a deficit in emotional awareness consisting of problems identifying, describing, and thinking about emotions. The results of Study 1 suggest that high alexithymia is not only related to problems distinguishing emotions, but also to problems distinguishing evaluations. Study 2 replicated this latter effect after controlling for individual differences in attentional impulsiveness and reflective reasoning, and found that reasoning makes an independent contribution to evaluation differentiation. These results suggest that emotional sensibilities play an irreducible role in evaluative judgment while affording a role for reasoning.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-023-32242-y