Processing Conditions, Visual Resource Allocation, and Social-Moral Emotion

The study involved 76 participants (46 males and 30 females) who were randomly assigned to two conditions, simultaneous and successive presentation of storyboard eliciting three social-moral emotions, shame, guilt, and remorse. In the successive condition, storyboards with three frames were displayed one at a time for 5 seconds each, while in the simultaneous condition, all frames were shown together for 15 seconds. Participants were instructed to visualize themselves in the scenarios and identify their emotional responses as guilt, shame, or remorse, rating the intensity of these emotions on a 5-point Likert scale. Results indicated that the simultaneous presentation significantly enhanced recognition accuracy for shame and remorse, while participants in the successive condition demonstrated shorter fixation times but higher fixation counts. Notably, longer fixation times were required to focus on shame-inducing stimuli compared to guilt or remorse in both conditions. Upon fixation, guilt elicited longer durations than shame in the simultaneous condition, with significant differences observed between remorse and shame as well. The study also found that pupil size varied across conditions, with guilt consistently resulting in larger pupil diameters than both shame and remorse. Overall, the findings highlight the differential cognitive processing involved in recognizing social-moral emotions, underscoring the impact of presentation format on emotional perception.