[1][2][3] As defined by Jonathan Haidt, moral emotions "are linked to the interests or welfare either of a society as a whole or at least of persons other than the judge or agent".
Moral emotions include disgust, shame, pride, anger, guilt, compassion, and gratitude,[5] and help to provide people with the power and energy to do good and avoid doing bad.
According to Jonathan Haidt: The principal moral emotions can be divided into two large and two small joint families.
[13] These components correspond to the moral event, whether helping or harming, and the exemplars involved, which would be the agent or the patient.
The empathy-altruism hypothesis states that feelings of empathy for another lead to an altruistic motivation to help that person.
[15] The Altruism Born of Suffering Literature states that individuals who have undergone difficult times and grown from this trauma identify with seeing others in need and respond altruistically by protecting or caring for others.
[18] Batson, Klein, Highberger, and Shaw conducted experiments where they manipulated people through the use of empathy-induced altruism to make decisions that required them to show partiality to one individual over another.
Those individuals who they successfully manipulated reported that despite feeling compelled in the moment to show partiality, they still felt they had made the more "immoral" decision since they followed an empathy-based emotion rather than adhering to a justice perspective of morality.
Batson, Klein, Highberger, and Shaw conducted two experiments on empathy-induced altruism, proposing that this can lead to actions that violate the justice principle.
Participants were faced with the decision to move an ostensibly ill child to an "immediate help" group versus leaving her on a waiting list after listening to her emotionally-driven interview describing her condition and the life it has left her to lead.
[14] Recently neuroscientist Jean Decety, drawing on empirical research in evolutionary theory, developmental psychology, social neuroscience, and psychopathy, argued that empathy and morality are neither systematically opposed to one another, nor inevitably complementary.
[19][20] Emmons (2009) defines gratitude as a natural emotional reaction and a universal tendency to respond positively to another's benevolence.
[21] In the context of social networking behavior, research from Brady, Wills, Jost, Tucker, and Van Bavel (2017) shows that the expression of moral emotion amplifies the extent to which moral and political ideals are disseminated in social media platforms.
Analyzing a large sample of Twitter communications on polarizing issues, such as gun control, same-sex marriage, and climate change, results indicated that the presence of moral-emotional language in messages increased their transmission by approximately 20% per word, compared to purely-moral and purely-emotional language.