Linking anger and disgust to motives and anticipations of aggression in the East: testing a socio-functional account of moral emotions in Japan

Anger and disgust often underlie responses to social transgressions, yet their links to aggressive punishments have been primarily studied in Western populations. Across two studies sampling from Japan, we tested a socio-functional account of these two other-condemning moral emotions, which predicts differential associations of anger and disgust with direct versus indirect aggression. Study 1 (N = 1,231) revealed that anger relates to motives to aggress both directly and indirectly, whereas disgust relates only to motives to aggress indirectly. Study 2 (N = 930) extended these findings by showing that people infer greater direct aggression from anger expressions and greater indirect aggression from disgust expressions. These results are largely the same as those previously observed in Western samples. Overall, findings suggest that across culturally distinct populations, anger and disgust play similar functional roles in regulating aggressive punishments.