Purity is not a distinct moral domain.

Purity violations overlap with other moral domains. They are not uniquely characterized by hypothesized markers of purity - the witness's emotion of disgust, taint to perpetrator's soul, or the diminished role of intention in moral judgment. Thus, Fitouchi et al.'s proposition that puritanical morality (a subset of violations in the purity domain) is part of cooperation-based morality is an important advance.

Deconstructing disgust as the emotion of violations of body and soul.

Through the evolutionary process of preadaptation, disgust was coopted to serve as the guardian not just of one's body but also of one's soul-or so it has been theorized. On this theory, elicitors include health-related threats and nonhealth-related degrading acts, which together form a pancultural domain of morality. A prediction from this theory was examined here in four samples: 96 English-speaking Americans, 96 Malayalam-speaking Indians, 136 Japanese-speaking Japanese, and 194 Arabic-speaking Egyptians. Participants read health and nonhealth threat stories (derived from prior studies) and were asked to judge how immoral the action was, what word describes the emotion elicited by the story, and what facial expression conveys that emotion. Even though health threats elicited disgust, they were seen as barely immoral if at all. In contrast, nonhealth events were immoral but elicited anger more than disgust. Emotional reactions to heath and nonhealth threats did not indicate that they are the same emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Do community and autonomy moral violations elicit different emotions?

According to one important set of theories, different domains of immorality are linked to different discrete emotions-panculturally. Violations against the community elicit contempt, whereas violations against an individual elicit anger. To test this theory, American, Indian and Japanese participants (N = 480) indicated contempt and anger reactions (with verbal rating and face selection) to both the types of immorality. To remedy method problems in previous research, community and autonomy violations were created for the same story-frame, by varying the target to be either the community or an individual. Community and autonomy violations did not differ significantly in the emotion elicited: overall, both types of violations elicited more anger than contempt (and more negative emotion of any kind than positive emotion). By verbal rating, Americans and Indians reported more anger than contempt for both types of violation, whereas Japanese reported more contempt than anger for both types. By face selection, the three cultural groups selected anger more than contempt for both types of violation. The results speak against defining distinct domains of morality by their association with distinct emotions.

Disgust and the sacred: Do people react to violations of the sacred with the same emotion they react to something putrid?

Disgust has been hypothesized to be uniquely linked to violations of a distinct moral domain (called divinity, purity, or sacred) aimed at preserving one's body from contamination with pathogens and preserving one's soul from violations of what is sacred. Here we examined whether the same emotion-core disgust-occurs when witnessing both types of violation, and we proposed a specific method for doing so. In two studies (N = 160; 240), American and Indian participants indicated their emotional reaction to (stories depicting) sacred or nonsacred violations, each either with or without pathogens. Both Americans and Indians felt "grossed out" (a term for core disgust) by events with pathogens (whether violations of the sacred or not). They felt disgusted and angered, but not grossed out, by violations of the sacred. For both Americans and Indians, grossed out was never the modal emotion when a sacred violation did not involve pathogens. Results were inconsistent with a focus on any single emotion: sacred violations were associated with several different negative emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).