Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Emotions serve a host of informative functions, from revealing one's internal states to communicating their goals and intentions. However, little is known about whether emotions signal one's moral character. This work explores this outstanding question in the case of anger and empathic pain. Across two studies, we found that both facial (S1; N= 594) and vocal (S2; N= 572) expressions of anger and empathic pain signaled justice and humanity virtues, respectively. We additionally found perceivers' evaluations of these emotions to be dependent on context. Perceivers were more sympathetic towards empathic pain versus anger expressions in a harm context, but showed no difference in an unjust context. However, in both harm and unjust contexts, perceivers had less negative beliefs about empathic pain expressions. These findings suggest that emotions can serve as multimodal signals of moral virtues and point to the relevance of context in perceivers' evaluations of emotions.