To form a more complete picture of the complexity that underlies human morality, the connection between emotion and moral thought in 209 men and women was examined. Participants rated the importance of one real-life and three hypothetical moral dilemmas and their feelings while making decisions about the dilemmas. The responses on these dilemmas also were scored for their care and justice orientations. Results showed that feeling upset and sympathy were uniquely positively related to dilemma importance. In the real-life situations, sympathy and anger uniquely predicted both care (positively) and justice (negatively) orientations. Relational real-life dilemmas evoked more emotions than did nonrelational ones. In general, women scored higher than men on emotions when considering moral dilemmas.
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Skoe et al. (2002) studied this question.
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