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The CAD model posits a mapping of contempt, anger, and disgust onto the moral codes of community, autonomy, and divinity, respectively. A recent study by Hutcherson and Gross posited moral disgust as the dominant other-condemning emotion across all three moral codes. However, the methodology used may have incidentally increased the relevance of disgust. In the current experiment, one condition repeated Hutcherson and Gross’s procedure, while in another condition, the authors added the word moral to three other emotions. Consistent with CAD, anger had the highest intensity ratings in response to autonomy violations, whereas “grossed out” was the dominant response to divinity violations. Furthermore, the adjective “moral” increased the relevance of anger, contempt, and fear in irrelevant domains, which suggests that the adjective moralincreases any emotion’s moral relevance.

The research examines whether anger rather than disgust is more likely to be responsible for changes in moral judgment, after individuals consider potential circumstances. Participants first read a scenario that described a moral violation (harm or fairness vs. purity) and then gave their initial moral judgment and emotions toward the act. They were then asked to list things that could change their opinion and were provided with an opportunity to fill out the measures again, re-evaluating the scenario with these changes in mind. It was found that ratings of disgust did not change after generating potential circumstances; however, anger changed in differential ways for the two violation types. It was also found that anger but not disgust predicted change in moral judgment. These findings suggest that moral anger is a more flexible emotion than moral disgust because anger is more likely to respond to changes in circumstances.