Some emotions, by their very nature, evoke in us feelings of right or wrong and good or bad. These are the moral emotions. The events and contexts surrounding our experience of these emotions create strong and enduring associations that will shape the meaning we give our moral emotions. What an emotion represents to us is mostly determined through our interpersonal interactions. This relational influence is particularly powerful on our moral emotions because of the inherently relational nature of those moral emotions. For example, feelings of guilt, shame, resentment, remorse, gratitude, among many others, all address feelings that relate to our interactions with others. These emotions have a significant moral influence because they are the felt sense of the rightness or wrongness of our interactions with others.

Moral emotions are so interpersonally meaningful that they are profoundly shaped by our interactions with people, especially our earliest interactions with parents and peers. Our associations to our moral emotions are very easily conditioned and this conditioning is enduring. While growing up, we look to others for the meaning of new or complex experiences. Observing how others respond to certain situations will shape, or even determine, the specific moral emotions evoked in us. When we receive approval and praise from a caregiver, we may have a feeling of beneficence; to the contrary, if our actions evoke in others disapproval or criticism, we may experience guilt, or perhaps shame.

The coherence between our actions and how our caregivers respond shapes our ability to accurately use moral emotions throughout our lives. Certain behaviors are normatively established as good or bad, for example hitting your little sister is bad. Many actions are neither good nor bad until determined to be so, based on the context. For example, feeling anger or disgust may be fitting in some situations and not in others. As children, we come to experience them as appropriately fitting, or not, based on the responses of our caregivers and peers.

Optimally, our emotional reactions would be met with neutral curiosity by others, giving us time to interpersonally explore the feeling, and also learning how to manage and regulate these intense emotions. However, this is not always the case, and where a caregiver reacts to a child’s emotions with their own forceful moral, emotional responses, these responses will become associated with the child’s initial emotion. Such emotional conditioning can determine the meaning we will ascribe to our emotions. For example, if a caregiver responds with disapproval to a child’s sadness, then the child could come to associate shame with sadness. An emotional pattern could develop where every time the child feels sad they also feel ashamed, making it difficult to feel sadness appropriately in life.

Incoherence in how our caregivers help us manage these moral emotions can result in severely debilitating, emotional conditioning. For example, an individual made to feel guilt for appropriate prideful behavior, would experience a fundamental incoherence as pride comes to be associated to guilt.

Coherence and what we consider a correct or incorrect emotional response is the result of moral norms that arise through social conditioning. Moral norms arise from the interlay between our moral emotions and the surrounding culture. The responses to our emotions are coherent when there is a normative pattern between what we feel and how others respond: for example, our sadness is met with compassion and our anger is met with appropriate reflection. Such coherence allows us to develop the capacity to use our emotions to appropriately evaluate our situation.

In addition to coherent emotional exchanges, the consistency of the emotions exchanged is also vital to the development of our viable use of moral emotions. For example, an individual who is shamed inconsistently will be compromised in using shame as appropriate evaluative feedback. Inconsistent shaming can arise across similar situations where a shame response is evoked at one time and not another, or where we are shamed inappropriately. This randomness in feeling shame makes it difficult for us to use our feeling of shame in understanding or learning from experience. Incoherent moral-emotional exchanges leave us with a feeling that our moral emotions are irrational and useless.

The absence of coherence and consistency in our emotional conditioning will leave us feeling as if our moral emotional responses are erroneous or misplaced. However, consistent interpersonal exchanges around a moral emotion will inculcate a consistent personal disposition toward that moral emotion. This will allow us to use the feeling, in the future, to make accurate inferences about our circumstances.

Consistent and coherent normative exchanges of moral emotions facilitate a capacity for consistent and coherent reliance on our moral, emotional responses to provide reliable, accurate, and meaningful information about a given situation. These patterns of moral emotional consistency contribute to the development of moral norms.