Etik och känslor : en empirisk studie av skuld- och medkänslor hos gymnasieelever – en prövning av Ortonys teori

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to test parts of Ortony's theoretical model relating to the cognitive structure of emotions in Swedish upper secondary school students. That part of the model, which was appropriate for the present study, deals with emotions attributed to the person who has perpetrated what is referred to as blameworthy actions. Ortony calls the possible emotions that you experience when you have committed a blameworthy action "self-reproach" emotion. Moreover another part of the model was chosen, dealing with "sorry-for" emotions, i.e. our compassion for humans around us who have got into displeased situations. In this thesis the word "emotion" refers to Ortony's definition, i.e.a "valenced reaction to events, agents, or objects, with their particular nature being determined by the way in which the eliciting situation is construed" (Ortony, 1990, p. 13). A number of hypotheses were derived, based on Ortony's theoretical suppositions as to "self-reproach" and "sorry-for" emotions. A design taken from the Facet theory, called the Facet design, was used to map, structure and analyse the field of research. The purpose of using Facet design was thus to use the design as a tool to determine the number of items that were to be in the gauge, as well as a system of classification to determine the content of the questions of the gauge. The statistical methods used at the tests were one-way within-subjects ANOVA, paired t-tests and simple linear regression. The results of the analyses showed that the self-reproach emotions were influenced significantly depending on the degree of the blameworthy actions, who was affected and finally how much the perpetrators of the blameworthy actions deviated from roles attributed to them by those around them. The results of the analyses of the "sorry-for" emotions for the person affected were in line with Ortony's theoretical suppositions, i.e. the more displeased an event is considered to be, the more a person did not deserve the displeased event, the more liked a person were who was affected by the displeased event, the stronger "sorry-for" emotions for the person affected. The results also showed that the correlation between the "self-reproach" variable and the "sorry-for" variable produced a significant positive correlation. Considering the aspects of gender, the analyses showed that the boys without exception had a lower average value in all the analyses connected with "self-reproach" and "sorry-for" emotions for those affected. Implication for further research on the results of the present study of students' emotions and thoughts about ethical issues were given.